The party is fuzzy around the edges, and it flickers in black and white, everyone’s lips moving, the words long forgotten. No mastering ancient Greek at age 3 for little Farley), denial would have disallowed me to recognize the unfolding pattern. Regardless, had I been a prodigy (I was not. ” that day? Did I slap my forehead and say, “Oh, poop!” or the like? No, my cognition back then was too darn dull. Yes, my parents had once again hired clowns. And I suppose-sorry, I know-that the pervasiveness of clowns that day is what causes it to outweigh in importance the birth of my brother Rolf the month before. It is time, as they say, to move on.Ī little clearer here and there, the next-oldest memory that I harbor happens also to be of a birthday party, my third, actually. īut my earliest memory, it seems, is straying from quiet purity I’m falling inch by inch into the din of speculation. (I speak of Joe, not Charlie.) I have a feeling all of us sounded like munchkin Donald Ducks from suckling the balloons of clowns. It’s possible I did too, because, in those days of raising baby by the book, my parents were considered mavericks, odd to the core, as odd as my mom’s pink politics in those days of black lists and McCarthy. Learned this early on.)Ĭome to think of it, my parents were fond of hilarity, so I bet they indulged in a little helium that day with their clown pals. (I seize every opportunity to laugh, no matter how utterly scanty the stimulus. You guys are supposedly funny? What a joke. Just in-your-face monsters of film land, their deranged irises flaring as if backlit by the torches of angry villagers. Her electric beehive coiffure-oh, my! And his pomaded bangs: black zigzags against a pale, stretch-marked forehead. Tacky looked more like Frankenstein’s monster and the monster’s bride. The mind simply can’t corral every last detail.īut there were clowns, for sure. Were nips taken from flasks hidden in the clowns’ bloated pantaloons? Who knows? For me, though, nothing more than some milk, thank you much, and some pathetic mish-mash of peas and carrots, I’d guess. Was there cake and punch? Probably, but for the adults only. And my two brothers haven’t been born yet. Just the five of us at my party, counting the clowns. I lash out with my hands but miss every time, like a kitten. Grinning harpies, their balloons thumping somehow silently, swoop down on my highchair, tickle my captive toes, and rub balloons against my head, the clowns’ instruments of torment sticking to the ceiling and my frizzled hair. I see only their simplest, blandest forms, their purpose unclear, until. But my memory refuses to make them and paint them. There must have been colorful shapes: fanciful animals squeezed into creation by the gloved hands of clowns. Perhaps the balloons were roundish only, and maybe they came in black and white only, but I doubt it. The gurgles and the screeches that I surely made are, like good children everywhere in time or place, seen but not heard.Īnd balloons! I remember balloons hovering above, but where they cling, the shapes and colors are lost amid the fluorescence of light and mind. Traveling through time from my grown up vantage, I am seemingly deaf. For though the year recalled is 1953, talkies haven’t been invented yet. And my parents are slapping their knees, having a laugh over the jesters’ antics, but everyone is mute. The swirl clearing, through my memory’s eyes I see the harlequins’ painted faces, their lips enormous and white, like wings of ghosts, fluttering in sync with a now-silent clown joke. Down the drain goes little Farley Aloysius Nostrum. Strapped to my teetering highchair, I was riding bronco a whirlpool of twitchy light, of portentous abyss. (A tad unsettling, to be honest.) Forgotten is the entwined buzz of voices and light fixtures, but there in that rec room, beneath dangling light bulbs, those two clowns flicker forever and ever. Outstretched like tentacles, long arms glom onto me. The adult strangers, arriving, are only blobs at first: intangible beasts in the distance, bobbing at the top of the stairs, slithering down, down, down, oozing onto the basement floor. Rain pat-patting the windows, the muddied lawn. Just two year old me, and my parents, in our basement rec room. A quiet, modest affair (at first, anyway). That is, my earliest memory is of a birthday party-mine, as a matter of fact-with two clowns anchoring the celebration.
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