My Earliest Memory
I attended a memoir writing lab last weekend. Here is one of the results from it.
My Earliest Memory
By Joan R. Saks Berman, Ph.D.
We were going to California by
train to see Uncle Sol and Auntie Ann. Although I was only about two and a
half, I remembered them from before they left Chicago for Uncle Sol to become a
Hollywood writer. That was when we lived in the apartment with the Murphy bed
that folded into the wall.
We
went by train because it was during World War II and air travel wasn't common
yet. I have my own young memories of the trip and some embellishments from
storytelling at family gatherings. I remember walking on the platform next to
the big, black locomotive at Union Station and seeing re red wheels that were
higher than I was. The "We" was my mother paternal Grandma Sarah and
me. We had our own compartment, with an upper funk bed that the porter would
pull down in the evening—could it be that Grandma climbed up the ladder to
sleep there? I also remember the toilet that folded up into the wall. For a
long time, I thought that perhaps that memory was an illusion, until, as an
adult in my 30's, I visited a friend in ICU and there was one just like it! It
was great to be validated.
During
the day we would sit in the coach with other passengers, many of whom wanted to
make friends with the cute toddler. The train was filled with soldiers going
from one end of the country to the other. My grandmother had carried a shopping
bag full of kosher corned beef, salami, and Jewish rye bread. My uncles, her
sons, ridiculed her, pointing out that the train had a dining car. Once the train
got under way, however, we were glad to be able to make our fragrant
sandwiches, because the wait for the dining car seemed interminable to the
hungry travelers, and they hovered around us, wishing they had been as smart as
my grandmother to bring food for the three-day trip.
After
the long train trip, I remember being in Los Angeles in the sun. in addition to
the adult people, there was "Cousin Johnson," a black cocker spaniel
who knew a few tricks. One of them, to my delight, was jumping over our legs on
command as we sat on the grass.