Marineland

Did you ever really try, I mean really try to remember your first memory? You try it, try remembering and see if it comes to you like a distant smell you once recalled. A longed-for sweet scent from an exotic flower, you somehow knew or had forgotten about. Sometimes memories are tucked behind our medulla oblongata of the brain and only reveal themselves when they care to, in a dream or some godforsaken nightmare, like some odorous foul smell that you’d rather all but forget but somehow now is stuck in your body like a piece of shrapnel from some immoral war. This bottom-most part of the brainstem, sitting right at the base of the skull where the brain connects to the spinal cord is hardly known to us, it is never really thought of or even considered, even though its key function that manages our breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, swallowing, coughing, and sneezing. In my case it also managed my earliest notion of safety, contentment and fear.

Back in the 60’s when seals and dolphins were the main attractions and Flipper and Lassie were man’s best friends. I remembered little. What does anyone remember at that age really? Sounds, colors and smells. I suppose the deaf see colors differently more intense and chromatic and maybe the blind hear differently than sighted folks, more acute and distinct but we all have an olfactory sense, we all can smell. Those smells can evoke the most basic of emotions. We all know the smell of cold or warm rain on pavement. We all can recall the freshness and new beginning of a spring morning or the decay of an autumn regret. The first biting chill of snow that brings hope for the holidays or the longing languid days of a windless sweltering August that is soon to end. If danger has a smell, then the innocent among us must know the smell of good and holiness. The ability to smell evil, even if they choose to ignore its temptations and vices.

I’ve heard it said, if one prayed hard, true and long enough to the Virgin Mary for her intercession and protection, one may smell roses. At my age I didn’t know how to pray as of yet and only recalled only smelling my grandmother’s tomato sauce.

I remember the smell of the sea air, the smell of fresh fish, the wind in my face. I couldn’t walk yet, let alone speak. Remembering an outdoor domed arena, a large steep building somehow intimately packed with spectators, shoulder to shoulder where the stage was a shimmering pool. At that young age I suppose everything is large and unknown. There is no cognitive understanding, just black and white, happy or irritated. Coddled in my mother’s arms it may have very well been my first foray into a large public place and gathering. I was born in January and apparently a stubborn Capricorn who loved his fruit, wide eyed trying to see the spectacle below. It obviously was summer, but I don’t remember being uncomfortable as I looked down from on high from the rafters to the activity on what was an overcast day. The crowd was cheering and the dolphins were jumping through hoops into the blue gray water. Maybe there was a ring of fire I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I’m sure there was. This must be Marineland. Yes, it was Marineland, a trip, our trip, our family vacation to Niagara Falls. I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt safe. Safe in my mother’s arms, happily looking at my mother’s loving face and smile, needing only and wanting my mother’s love.

On a hot summer day being held by my tall father trusting in his strength of holding on to me. Don’t let go Daddy! The panic of him not being able to hold onto me, of letting go of me in that pool. Water; the cool and life giving substance and yet it could have easily become a watery death chamber. I was frightened of being let go by him and sinking to the depth of that watery grave. Even if my mind could not comprehend death. I remember fear.

Some people don’t believe me when I recount my story. My sister would say, “That’s ridiculous, that’s impossible, There is no way you can remember that! Why should I believe you?” but I swear I remember the day AFTER JFK got shot. Not the day of the shooting, but the day after. My days had been the same, day after day, morning after morning. They had been constant with no variation. Every morning being driven to my grandparents’ house while my parents worked at my father’s beauty shop. My father drove his Brown Buick Riviera, while I looked out the car window being held on my mother’s lap, her holding me in her arms as the world whizzed by. The traffic and people were a pattern that became routine until that fateful day on November 22nd, 1963. The next day, no one was on the road. That day, the world came to a stop. That day I became aware that things were not routine and were different. I was almost 2 years old.

I remember that following spring being held by my mother once again. She held me by one arm as I balanced myself on the branches of a flowering purple crab apple tree. While the biker revved up his motorcycle next door. Later that evening my father swore that we were moving out from that apartment to our own home. I remember the fights. I remember the screaming. I remember the police. I remember them leaving. I went to bed. I woke up to new surrounding new playmates and smells. The memories were now no longer new but distant. The way a song sounds oddly familiar and then recognizable. Whenever I hear the Ventures song, Walk Don’t Run on the radio I think of the streetlights racing through the car window as I tried not to fall asleep on the back seat at night. I remember being happy on the day the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show.

I remember hearing the gun shots, seeing blood. The smell of fish.