2 posts tagged “childhood”

When I was five, I liked to put talcum powder on my hands before I went to bed (why, I have no idea). I also liked to get myself a glass of water. The trouble was that if I put the powder on first, I'd get it wet when I filled my water glass. If I put the powder on second, I'd get powder in my water. I did the former, because I was worried that the powder might be poisonous. But one evening, I decided to live a little and do it the other way around.

But after I had been in bed for a few minutes, I was struck with terrible remorse. Oh god! It probably WAS poisonous. How could I have been such a fool? I wept. My father heard my stifled, choking sobs from the next room.

"Are you all right?" he called.

"Yes!" I said. "Fine! I was just coughing."

Then I got to work wondering how long poison could take to kill me. After all, I wasn't dead yet. How long would it be before I knew I was in the clear? I began to calculate. Right now I was in kindergarten. Next year, I would be six and in first grade. When I was seven, I would be in second grade. (Hey! If you subtract five from your age, you get the grade you're in! Clever!) Right. Probably if I was still alive by the time I started second grade, then, I could safely assume that the talcum powder had not, in fact, killed me.

The end.

When I was little, I spent quite a lot of time at the house of my maternal grandparents, while my parents were at work. My grandfather was a concert pianist, and they kept three pianos of varying quality, none of which I was permitted to touch. The house was always pristine, and featured wall-to-wall cream carpet and very good, child-unfriendly modernist furniture. I was not permitted to do anything that would make a mess, so I spent a lot of time outdoors, gathering infinite numbers of teeny tiny pinecones, or indoors, reading or watching TV for hours on end behind closed doors while standing on the arms of a black leather armchair.

I remembered this morning that while she lived in this house, my grandmother kept an actual bottle of smelling salts by her bed -- whatever for? -- and sweetened her coffee with tiny saccharine tablets which she would snap neatly in half with her thumbnail. The two containers of small white things were therefore naturally linked in my mind, though I only ever saw her use the latter. Now of course no one uses either one, though smelling salts seem far further out of date than saccharine does. She also had a housekeeper come once a week to do the heavy cleaning, although heaven knows she never let it get remotely mussed in between times. He was a middle aged black man named Mr. Tillman, who I remember was very impressed that I could spell his name correctly (I made him a card once for some occasion) and who always smoked a cigar as he cleaned.

!

And this is why my strongest triggers for nostalgic melancholy include the sound of a piano being played very competently in the acoustics of a house, rather than a concert hall or recording studio, and the mingled scent of sweet tobacco and Pledge.