Well Spring of Memory: First Memories

The Music Box

               I am warm and drowsy.  There is a light blanket covering me.  I can see the railing and bars of the crib on my left.  It is dark in the room but I can see daylight through the curtains at the window at the end of the crib.   The window is open and high above the crib, is a narrow window with pale blue curtains blowing into the room.  On the corner of the dresser drawers at the end of the crib there is a music box and it is playing soft, tinkling music. 

               I have always known that memory but it wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I recounted it to my mother.  She looked at me incredulously and declared I couldn’t possibly remember that.  She told me that the setting I described was the corner of the bedroom that I shared with my parents when I was less than a year old and we lived in the trailer that was provided as temporary housing for the WWII GI’s at the University of Minnesota.  At last I knew where the memory came from, I had always known it but had never consciously described it to anyone.

               There is an old photograph of my parents, newly married, ages 22 and 21 standing together in the sunshine with the trailer behind them.  My mom is looking up at my dad, from her 5 feet 4 inches to his 6 feet 4 inches, as he smiles down at her, obviously very much in love.  I can see the small windows in the trailer, the one that was our bedroom.  We moved from the trailer to the more spacious GI barracks before my first birthday.

               The music box was packed up and shipped with us to India where it was played for my younger siblings as they each arrived.  It was round, pink, enameled and had four little feet. I learned later that it played Brahm’s lullaby.  I wound it up and listened to it many times over the years.  I don’t know what become of the music box but I remember hearing it and knowing it meant love, rest and security.

Well Spring of Memory: Sputnik and Mickey Mouse Club

Sputnik and Mickey Mouse Club

                There was anxiety in her voice, Mrs. Bristow I think her name was, my 3^rd grade teacher in

Ithaca,  New York.   I knew I had to respect her, towering, slightly unhappy and mostly not very nice.  She had asked me to read aloud one time and when I came to the word “cupboard” I stumbled, pronouncing it as two separate words, because it was hyphenated across two lines.  She corrected me and quite unnecessarily explained what a cupboard was.  She knew I was her strange student, the one who had lived in India for 6 years and was only with her for one year.

               She radiated urgency and a little bit of fear.  We had our Weekly Reader’s spread out on our wooden desk tops.  The front page story was about something called Sputnik which was apparently a satellite that Russia had launched into space and it was circling the world.  I must have understood the concept of space, although the only air plane ride I had had by that time in my life was when I was 18 months old and did not recall.  I could smell the faint aroma of graham crackers and milk that we had each morning at 10.  The room was over warm with all our small bodies radiating heat.

               I realized that there was something terribly wrong, that America had lost something called the “space race.”  I felt bad for America and for poor Mrs. Bristow who seemed concerned.  We poured over the grainy pictures of what must have been the Sputnik satellite and listened while Mrs. Bristow assured us that America would soon catch up in the race, whatever that was.

               We had periodic drills in school that year when the buzzer would sound and we all went into the hall and got under desks and chairs.  The floors were wood, worn and uneven and smelled like dust as I lay crouched in the hall.

               It was a puzzling year, so out of context for me, things that raised a sort of free-floating anxiety about being American when I didn’t really understand about being American.  I did love the Mickey Mouse Club though, which I watched almost every afternoon, on the giant TV set with the tiny little black and white screen.  M-i-c-k-e-y m-o-u-s-eee.  I thought Annette Funicello was the most beautiful girl in the world and wished for dark, curly hair and her sweet dimpled smile.

               I also watched an episode of Dragnet one night when my parents had left us alone and gone to a lecture class on the Cornell campus.  I was terrified by the music and the ominous discovery of human bones beside a fence which was the story line.

               Before I knew it we were packing barrels, buying quantities of American things we’d want in India, getting physicals and updating passports.  Then we drove to New York city and took a TWA jet liner across the Atlantic and were soon back home in India where there was no Mrs. Bristow, no TV, no fear about Sputnik.  Just my Indian friends who laughed uproariously when I announced in perfect Hindi that I had forgotten all my Hindi.

Well Spring of Memory: Jalabis

Jalabis

            A fact about India is that even the smallest village will have a shop  that sells tea and makes a wide variety of candy called the halwai.  My favorite confection is jalabis.  As I close my eyes and imagine the taste it is more like imaging heaven, warm, sweet, crunchy, just the right lingering hint of sourness from the fermented dough and the stale fat where the jalabi was fried, the sugar syrup running down my chin, to my hand and even down my arm to drip off my elbow.  Total immersion in deliciousness.

            Any pilgrimage back to India involves the plan to find and eat jalabis which is no small feat.  My Aunt Ann declared on her first trip back in 45 years that she was going to find a halwai and order a kilo of jalabis and eat them all herself.   Her enthusiasm amazed me, I thought I had a corner on the craving but she was obviously as passionate about jalabis as I was. 

            The trick to finding jalabis is to be at a shop when they are being prepared – if they are cold or having been sitting with flies on them they are not edible.  Each shop has a specific time of day for making jalabis, either early morning or just at dusk. As you walk through the bazaar or drive through villages you keep an eye out for the halwai, squatting beside his huge wok, the flames leaping up on all sides, his wrist move in quick spirals as he squeezes the dough in pretzel shapes into the bubbling oil.  Once the pan is filled with rows of the jalabis he deftly flips them over one time, and then tosses the batch into the waiting sugar syrup.   That sight makes my heart sing – fresh jalabis.

            I love the surprise on the shop keepers face when my white self asks in Hindi to please sell me 200 grams of those fresh jalabis.  It is a paltry order but it is perfection – I will eat every one, exclaiming “yum” and “perfect” as I polish them off.  

Well Spring of Memory: Next Piece

Bisrampur

               

Standing at the place where the gate used to be I look down the long expanse of over-grown yard to what is left of the house.  I am there to bury my father’s ashes.  He asked specifically to have his ashes returned to Bisrampur and that there be a “big khana” to celebrate.  In the yard there are two large shamyanas being erected of bright patchwork canvas where those coming to the service will be fed an extravagant lunch of rice, mutton curry, vegetables and gulab jamuns.

The house was built in the mid-1800’s by Rev. Lohr the Germany missionary who came by bullock-cart from Calcutta, gathering orphans on the way as people were dying by the thousands in a terrible famine, leaving babies by the roadside.  It was colonial in its proportions, six large rooms spread down the length of a verandah with bathrooms, dressing rooms, and kitchen arranged in the back.  The ceilings were 18 feet, with narrow upper windows that could be opened to encourage air movement on the scorching days of Indian summer.  It was always white washed each year after the monsoons to cover the mud splashes and ever-present monsoon mold.

I see it as it was, potted plants, ferns, philodendron, and coleus, along the porch between the pillars.  The small stone ramp that went up at one place where, if I was very careful, I could ride my bicycle right up onto the verandah.  I missed it one time and still bear the scar on the back of my leg from the deep cut from the kick stand on my bike.  I see my dad driving down the long driveway, into the port cochere in his Willys Jeep, jumping energetically from the driver’s seat and bounding into the house calling for my mom.  I am reading on my bed, for the second time, a paper back copy of Hawaii left by some American visitor. 

I am beckoned back from the past as the young men digging the grave come to ask where the stone is to be placed.  The enormity and importance of the day intrudes.

I see the large tamarind tree, which was at least 90 feet, is gone now.  A large limb of it has fallen onto the tiled roof and it has not been removed.  The few rooms that remain at the far end have been painted a dull red, a way to not paint every year to cover the mud stains.  There is a large, temporary kitchen being constructed in what is left of the port cochere – huge pots of rice that will boil as we conduct the service.

It was our family home for about a dozen years but as children we were only there in the winter, as school was 1000 miles away in the Himalayas.  But it is where I am from in many significant ways.  It is now where I will always return to visit dad’s grave but then he is in my dreams on many nights so we are never really far apart.

Well Spring of Memory: Chautauqua Workshop with Roy Hoffman

Here is the first of the pieces that I wrote for the Well Spring of Memory workshop.  It was a great privilege and even more fun to have Roy Hoffman as the workshop leader. 

Apple Butter

               Esther looked down on the glossy, brown head of her granddaughter who was prattling on about knowing where babies came from.  Her five-year old self-importance was amusing but she knew that her daughter-in-law needed a brief respite from the demands of the two older children as she entered the last few days of her third pregnancy.  So she had offered to take Elizabeth back to the bungalow across in the other compound so that Elizabeth could join her grandfather for a cup of “coffee” when he came back to the house after his morning surgery schedule.

               As they entered the bungalow with its large, dark rooms,  Esther called to the cook to put the water on to boil for the morning coffee.  It was an unnecessary reminder as she and Joshua had a break for coffee every morning at around 9:30.  She stopped beside the kerosene refrigerator and took out the pitcher of milk, seeing that the cream had risen to the top.  She would skim it off and make some butter after they had their coffee together.

               Glancing at her hand as she gripped the pitcher handle she remembered the many hours she had spent milking cows as a girl in Ohio.  How distant and how near that memory was.  Her childhood on the farm near New Knoxville had been poor preparation for this strange land where she had raised her three boys.  It was October now and her sister and brothers would be bringing in the corn crop, would be splitting wood and gathering in apples from the orchard.   They always cooked up a huge kettle of apple butter over the fire pit behind the barn because there was no other way to use the bountiful harvest of apples.  She could smell the smoke and see her mother, rotund and barely tall enough to stir the ladle around and around in the kettle.  Her job had been to keep stoking the fire, pushing logs into the pit below.

               Fall was her favorite time of year with the leaves changing color, the days shortening, and the cool crisp temperatures foretelling of the real cold and snow to come.   There was no discernable fall in central India, although the scorching heat of summer and relentless wet of the monsoon would end there were none of the signs she yearned to see.

               She had known she would follow Joshua wherever he went, was bewitched by his great sense of adventure, his deep conviction that his skill as surgeon was God’s gift that was to be shared in the world, not in Minnesota or Ohio, but where there were souls to be saved, as a witness to Jesus commandment to love.  She did not know that it would mean sending her children far away to school; that she would know loneliness that seemed to have no cure.

               “Grandma, can I have a cookie?”

               She looked down at Elizabeth’s inquiring face.  At least she had her beloved son and his family near-by.  She had learned to make the unfamiliar and strange a place with ritual and routine that would pass for home.

               “Yes, you may have a cookie but save the one with jam for grandpa.”