What's New Orleans?
Ellsberg, Peggy
What's New Orleans?
PEGGY ELLSBERG AL s I waited with my sixyear-old son in stalled traffic on the West Side Highway, at the end of a long day, we were both feeling haggard and hungry. My son was...
...I turned on the car radio, hunting for some evening news...
...My adult life is crammed with errands and appointments and lists...
...But Nicholas has so few years to keep track of...
...Nicholas's face looked blank...
...Flannery O' Connor said something to the effect that all you needed to be a writer was to have been a child...
...And so as I drove Nicholas home toward his dinner that night, I thought that perhaps the solitudes and silences of infancy and of old age have something in common...
...But now in his final days, a curtain seemed to open onto a floodlit stage busy with early drama-a button missing on a sailor suit, the smell of frying chicken at a church supper, snow so deep it covered the kitchen windows, a goldfish...
...Since he was born we have always taken Nicholas everywhere with us...
...I wish I had some of the gumbo we tried last year in New Orleans," I replied as we inched along in traffic...
...He could recall perfectly a chocolate he had eaten when he was nineteen months old, but he had completely missed three days of unforgettable pageantry just last year...
...we claimed, "she died when you were only fourteen months old...
...And just as I fall with a thud into deep sleep, I am invariably haunted by the sense that I'm forgetting something...
...Commonweal 6 May 1994: 31...
...Certainly no one had ever taken him to see Mardi Gras or the changing of the guard...
...Nothing in my life, I resolved, would be lost...
...She was painting pictures on a lampshade...
...So Nicholas would have a head start by being a child with fabulous memories...
...I was especially surprised by this gap because Nicholas usually has an excellent memory...
...Turn around and you're tiny...
...Remember when he took you to McDonalds and you got a peacock feather...
...Grandpa's mother had died when he was a baby, and his childhood had been filled with long hours of hard work on a midwestern farm, unrelieved by maternal affection...
...And I remember my mother," whispered Grandpa on the evening of his death...
...Once he had told me that he could recall nothing before his sixteenth birthday...
...Traffic was finally sailing along, and I began to consider that when Grandpa, in his nineties, lay on his deathbed, he suddenly began to remember things...
...Instead, I heard a woman with a Texas accent singing "Where are you going, my little one, little one," a song that has always made me weepy...
...When my husband came out on the porch to investigate why we were still sitting in the car, he found me clutching the steering wheel, choked up over that silly song...
...My son was yearning for a chocolate Easter egg...
...I was taking in the lilacs, trying to memorize them, trying to hold on tight to something I knew would have to be lost...
...Yes," I said...
...said Nicholas with relief...
...I was still in the driver's seat, the engine off, the radio on...
...I was amazed that Nicholas could remember that Easter at Caroline's...
...Of course, things are different now...
...Who wouldn't forget a childhood like that...
...I pulled into my driveway, and parked under the lilac bushes, thick and heavy with their perennial purple fragrance...
...You can't possibly remember her...
...We have hoped that by exposing him to our modest travels we will widen his horizons, fill his world with vivid impressions of exotic landscapes and distinctive cities...
...I wish I had one now...
...Her dress had a big white bow in the back...
...And already he was starting to forget things...
...He likes to strap himself into an airplane seat and study the map in the flight magazine...
...And I turned around...
...It's right next to Yonkers...
...Was Daddy in New Orleans, too...
...turn around and you're grown," the song continued...
...I collapse into bed each night, so tired that I cannot stay awake long enough to review my day...
...And that was no surprise...
...D Peggy Ellsberg teaches at Barnard College...
...And why couldn't I remember buying that egg...
...For that brief moment, he was still six years old...
...my son asked, eager to crack this mystery...
...McDonalds...
...Now I remember...
...The one you gave me when we were at Caroline's, with white inside, and then yellow inside that...
...In middle age, mine is starting to slip: I cannot tell you one single thing that happened to me between the ages of twentysix and twenty-nine, for example...
...We were right next to Yonkers ourselves by now, and my son, exhausted by this Herculean strain on his memory, fell asleep...
...But I do remember her...
...I told him it was incredible to me that he could forget the outlandish costumes, the bands playing Dixieland music in the streets, the steamboats on the Mississippi River...
...And I tell you that I could not for my life comprehend how whole years had vanished in the space of mere weeks...
...And I looked at my child, suddenly half-grown, and I could have sworn that it was just a few weeks ago, certainly no farther back than Christmas, that he was a brand new baby in an infant safety seat, his eyes and his tiny fists closed around the inscrutable slumber of not yet knowing things...
...Turn around and you're two, turn around and you're four," she sang sadly...
...I looked over at my sleeping son, his fair shining head filled with a sweet disorder of super-soakers and Happy Meals and long summer evenings, all of it swirling in the half-understood dream of early childhood...
...There had been a time when I was seventeen or eighteen when I recorded every single thing I did in a diary...
...I cried in shock...
...he had been less than two...
...Nicholas asked...
Vol. 121 • May 1994 • No. 9
