I don't have a lot of memories from my childhood. Not ones that are organic and tactile, at least. In my family, I was always the one to spend hours perusing the black and red photo albums my mom had numbered over the years, bought on sale at Boots and filled with still moments. Somehow these had to translate into sensory memories for me since they didn't come naturally.
I didn't dream at night. I couldn't recall by day. All I had were photos—and the unpredictable flashes of emotion and hazy stills. Until this memory. This memory was real and it was one I could feel. There was no photo attached to it; only a photo that ignited it. And at last, I remembered.
I'd been scrolling mindlessly through Facebook, on day 36 of the mandatory coronavirus quarantine. I stopped at a friend's post where they'd shared photos of toddlers doing fun learning games at home using recycled materials. The small children were putting colored balls inside matching colored paper tubes, matching finger cutouts with the appropriate cardboard hand, and counting out the correct number of acorns into small dishes with numbers inside them. Then I saw the photo.
The little girl sat on a light brown wooden chair pulled up to a white and wood-bordered matching table just at her height. She was wearing a gray All-Star tshirt with green letters and her brown curls were tousled on top of her head with a metallic silver butterfly clip. In her hands she clasped a magnetic colored letter of the alphabet. She was smiling down at the wooden board in front of her, most of its spaces empty, only a green J, a purple N, and a red R filling their respective cutouts. To the left of the board were tinfoil wrapped surprises, more letters for the waiting slots.
In that moment, a picture came to mind. I know those letters! Those are magnetic. They stick on the fridge. But there should be a plastic board to hold them all. And there's something more.
Seconds later, Google had pulled up the photo for me. A vintage Fisher-Price Play Desk. Ages 3-8. Came with a plastic board holding the entire alphabet, extra letters, numbers 0-9, a small box of white chalk, a stiff foam eraser attached to a yellow plastic backing stamped with the logo, a hidden drawer at the top of the desk where you could store all the letters, and cardboard panels with pictures illustrating a cutout word. You were supposed to slide the panel into the bottom of the chalk-topped desk, fill in the cutout with magnetic letters, and then practice writing the word in the empty space above the panel.
Tears came into my eyes as I remembered sliding the chunky plastic letters into the slots until they fit. I must have been younger than reading age because I was playing by instinct, not by knowledge. I remember being extra careful with the chalk so it wouldn't break, perhaps because I knew we couldn't get more chalk so easily. But then we must have been in Africa and I would have been at least 4 1/2 by then. The eraser wasn't the best, it would smudge the chalk more than clear it, but I felt like a proper teacher and loved pushing it up and down to wipe the green slate as clean as I could. When playtime was over, I slid open the drawer at the top, it gave with little hesitation, and put all the letters, eraser, and chalk back into their secret hiding place. I carefully gathered the cardboard panels and shuffled them together, then pushed them into the mailbox opening at the bottom of the play desk.
I don't have a memory of place and I cannot be sure of the time, but the memory of that play desk is as real as the blue-gray sofa I am sitting on today as I write this in my quiet living room in Lebanon, the hum of dehumidifier in the corner, last year's miniature Christmas tree still upright behind it, and 5 honeymoon flags adorning our heater in diagonality behind that.
The memories I am making today, most times I wish I wouldn't, as I feel they cannot ever compare with the emotional tug of memories put together in a childhood of nostalgia. A green bedsheet hanging on a metal clothesrack, a stone-washed blue plastic picture frame filled with miniatures set on a shell-themed background, and fake pink and white cherry blossom branches spilling out of a turquoise ceramic rippled vase are easy enough to describe but hold no emotional attachment. I could walk out of here leaving them behind and never remember.
But there are memories in this house. There's the two-foot tall white electric heater, with its four-sided coil reflectors and bonus top heating pad where my husband cooked rice and lentils in his dorm room for me when we were still dating. The 250 mL local fresh Balki's orange juice plastic bottle, somewhat distorted from its original shape by getting too close to the fire at times, that holds salt and traveled with us throughout 5 European countries, and I couldn't leave it behind so I risked paying hefty overweight fees to bring back an empty plastic juice bottle with matching orange lid. There's the statue of a father, mother, and child holding hands, carved out of a single piece of dark African wood, that my husband brought back from his maiden trip to Africa, not knowing I'd had to leave behind too many African mementos when the family splintered.
Today I'm still creating memories. I do not know which memories will be ones I want to tuck into a cedar box for safekeeping and which memories I will discard in time. All I know is that I don't want to lose myself like I did 30+ years ago.
Back then, I had to reinvent myself so many times I could not bear to hold the memories in my mind, so they sank into a grayness of oblivion. It hurt too much to try to bring along each Maria into my new life, so I would set her in the corner and close the door, locking it tightly so she couldn't get out. Then I would march into my new life, set my face resolutely to learning the new rules and expectations and innuendos of this life, and start all over again creating memories. Except this time, I want to start opening those doors, one by one, and inviting each child, each teenager, each persona, into the life I live today. I need to know who I was before and it is only in rubbing those magnetic letters between my adult fingers again that I can know I existed. And I was loved. And I was real. Because I remember.
