More archeology of memories

[larryhammer]

At the end of our year in Japan, my parents took the long route home -- across Asia and Europe. With an active four-year-old in tow -- or more often, running ahead in need of leash. I am in awe, though at the time it was just one stimulus after the other.

As in archeology, the remains are spotty, fragmentary, and sometimes shards seem displaced. The layers, though, represent not time but place. I can place these memories:

• Philippines: The couple days on a private house-raft in a shallow bay belong here. Also the ride in a shallow motorized boat on a tropical river. I think also the elephant ride -- India would make more sense, but my memory insists on putting that next to the boat ride.


• Hong Kong: A flash of red-flower curtains in a hotel window.


• India: Cars in New Delhi. A visit by a doctor for my father and me, for some stomach bug. The Taj Mahal in stills: from down the avenue, seen in the reflecting pool, craning my head up to see from closer, climbing alabaster stairs, a dusky interior with an intricately carved screen, everywhere the scent of jasmine. Monsoons arriving while driving back from the Taj Mahal: flooded road, weaving around water buffalo in a pale blue Volkswagen Beetle that nearly floated away.


• Nepal: A long bus ride through barren rocky hills on a gravel road, with a stop to stretch at a bridge I was told we couldn't walk across because the other side was in China.


• Tehran: The excitement of being the first people being let off the plane.


• Greece: A ruined temple's worth of memories -- climbing over blocks of the Parthenon, dinners in small harbor restaurants, pelicans in harbors. A week in Mykonos amid piles of white geometric buildings. The weathered lions of Delos. Octopussies: cool to look at, squirmy to touch, awful to eat. A footrace after dinner my father let me win. The boat captain's hat my father bought. Watching steep rock walls of a canal pass behind the ferry, which I cannot place. The ferry grounding on rocks in a tight channel, which I think was on the way to Thera. The joy that is dolomades and baklava and sticky hands. And everywhere, the multicolored sea.


• Yugoslavia: Supposedly we drove through it, but the only memory that seems to fit is riding in a red car down an indistinct highway -- and that could well be from the States.


• Venice: Puttering about in a lot of boats. Chasing pigeons in the Plaza San Marco. Tromping through a gallery (or two?). Teh Boredom (?!) that is visiting the studios of glass-blowers (!!). Bridges -- over and under. The color of dusky blue.


• Unidentified place in Italy: A very small room of worn, rough-hewn stone, with one painting on display in the center -- in memory, it's a Bosch. Both visit and painting featured in dreams (but not nightmares) for years afterwards. If anyone can figure out where this might have been, please let me know. There's a good chance the painting wasn't Bosch (in Italy??) and my brain has conflated the image with the reproduction "The Garden of Earthly Delights" triptych my parents hung in the dining room.


• A beach near Barcelona: sun sand sun waves sand play sun sand incident-with-telephoto-lens sand sun wheeee! Also, a theme park with scarycoolfunscary rides, where I learned the valuable lesson of waiting to use the ride ticket for the cooler ride, not the one in front of me. Crying when I realized the consequences of my choice.


• Home: Being reintroduced to the boy across the street, whom I couldn't remember, by having our heads conked together. Gee, thanks, Dad.

I find the omissions as striking as the surviving recalls: no Katmandu? no Yugoslavian roadtrip? and how did we get from Italy to Spain?

---L.

Comments

[maryosmanski.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful set of memories!

I am familiar with the odd-bits-here-and-there phenomenon; I have something similar for a much more prosaic train trip from Southern California to Minnesota and back again when I was three going on four.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

That was amazingly cool. Thank you for that stunning cascade of images.

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

I wonder if those steep cliffs might have been Corinth.

Great memories. Thera is on Santorini. It is one side of a caldera, but I don't recall any sleek cliffs. Cliffs, yes, but your discription matches Corinth more.

I have a book in front of me that I heartily reccommend. Worlds to Explore. Edited by Mark Jenkins with a forward by Simon Winchester. True stories of adventures in, for the most part, the 20s.


Could the small stone room be in Florence? Perhaps the Church of San Marcos. It is filled with Fra Angelica paintings. Some quite Bosch like.

[larryhammer]

The canal walls are consistant with the Corinth channel, but I cannot reconstruct a route that takes us through it -- we spent, I think, all our time out in the Aegean, when not in Athens, and didn't go into the Gulf of Corinth.

Florence is possible, as is Milan. Fra Angelico isn't inconsistant with the memory. Huh.

---L.

[kchew.livejournal.com]

My husband's family did the same thing after a year in Japan, but went home using the northerly route and the Trans-Siberian Railway. John was eight, and his brother six on the way back. I get exhausted just thinking about it. It was a formative trip for him, and I hope that we can do even a fraction of that kind of traveling for our kids.

I'll have to read back to find out why you were in Japan for a year (how very cool).

[larryhammer]

Trans-Siberian! Coooooooooool.

Possibly even cooler than our trip.

---L.

[incandragon.livejournal.com]

Gads. That was an amazing treasure spill! Your memory seems to work a lot like mine: a snippet with a scribble at the bottom to associate it with a place or event. But dang, that's a wealth of cool for a four year old. All I had was a tonsilectomy.

Salute to your parents for being bold enough to make the trip with a four-year old. Magic!

[larryhammer]

I think of it as almost but not quite as cool as the living in Japan part. Even if there's more variety.

---L.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I want to go on that trip!

I remember trips to glassblowers in Juarez, Mexico; but, as there were multiple trips over the years, not the first, or how old I was. But, I was fascinated by the glassblowing, which my memory insists was done by shirtless men working in the glow of the ovens in dark, cavernous warehouses where everything but the interior of the overs and the gleaming glass on the ends of the tubes was covered in thick layers of soot. Leaving this scene reminiscent of Hephaestus' demesne, we would walk into the glass shop, where everything was glass and chrome, brilliant and polished, the contrast with the forge room making the simplest objects seem precious and beautiful.

Later, my dad would take us to his lab at the university, where we learned to heat glass tube over a Bunsen burner until the heated end melted and closed, and to blow a glass bubble at the end. As we never managed anything particularly attractive or with an interesting shape, my awe for the skill of the glassblowers was only increased.

Your memories of Spain are not very different from those I have as a parent, taking Ian, age 5, and Keith, age 2, to the beach (although our beach was a mix of gray sand and rock), to the beach-side amusement park in Almuñecar, and to plazas in larger towns, where they swung on heavy chains stretched across entryways to prevent vehicular traffic and chased pigeons who were always just out of their reach.

[larryhammer]

I suspect the Venetian glassmakers we visited did not actually show us any blowing, and we were only visiting the shop side. Thus my boredom.

---L.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense. It's actually quite awesome that we were allowed into the glassblowing area, as there were surely dangers in allowing the public in. There was no barrier between us the the workers and the forges, so if one of us kids had darted in, we could have been badly burned. Later, they closed the work area to the public; I can remember going over and being disappointed to be refused entrance to anything but the shop. All the mystery was hidden away.