Popcorn Songs

Sometimes I try to remember back as far as I can.

I heard once some people remember their cribs. My memory only goes back to about 3 or 4 I think.

The oldest fully-formed memory I have is lying in my bed in my parents’ house in Wesleyville or Lawrence Park or wherever it was. It wasn’t the farmhouse. The bedroom had pale blue walls, or maybe they just looked that way because it was night and the big lights weren’t on. I’m pretty sure I had a nightlight. I still have a nightlight, but it’s in the bathroom now. Maybe that doesn’t count. It may have been the moonlight that spilled through the double windows set into a dormer that gave the walls their ethereal color. I don’t remember curtains. But, then, I don’t remember much except the shape of where the ceiling slope gave way to the dormer, the angles and the play of light and shadow over them. I think my bed sat nestled in the dormer and the door opened on the wall opposite the bed. The harder I try to look at these old memories, the fuzzier they get, as if you can only see them clearly if you don’t look too closely or straight at them.

I was awakened in my memory, but I don’t know now if it was the monster in the closet or the one under the bed that did it. I don’t know which of those I believed in because my memory has been tainted by all the movies and stories that teach you children believe in monsters in closets and under beds. Maybe it was a bad dream that woke me.

I don’t remember anything else about that house, except a picture of the front surrounded by identical houses around it, like you would find in a real estate listing. The houses were tightly spaced, with just enough room for an alley to the backyards on one side—or maybe two tire tracks worn down into a driveway. There was a covered porch. It feels like it should have been a side-by-side duplex, but the memory can neither confirm nor deny.

The next thing I still remember was at the farmhouse. It was an eerie overcast day. Overcast days should be gray and misty, but I remember the sky was a light amber and the world beyond the sliding glass door of the living room looked sharp, more in focus. It was the strange light you get when the sky over you is cloudy, but the sun is low and streams in from beyond the cloud cover. But the sky was a solid mass that day. My dad called me over to the window to watch something—or was that added by my imagination after? There was a single set of telephone poles on the far side of the dirt road. At the top of one about three poles down was a gray cylinder with wires coming out of it. Maybe it was glowing. Again, I don’t know if I’ve added that since, now that I’ve seen a transformer explode all on it own—next to a gas station no less. Whether it was glowing at the time, or not, I knew for some reason I should be watching the transformer. A blue-white stream of light shot from the sky and blew the top of the pole to smithereens. I think it was lightning. And that’s all I remember about that.

Blue must be my favorite color, because I remember the walls of the hospital as sickly blue and not green like everyone says they were. There was a crack in the plaster wall that ran from floor to ceiling. Apparently I’d come close to dying and that’s why I don’t remember anything that led up to the hospital and surgery. Unless maybe my sinuses had been suctioned by the ear, nose and throat specialist before the hospital--I remember that. I remember I was unhappy about it, but no specific sensations. Tonsils and adenoids were removed. Who the hell knows what adenoids are anyway? I researched it once and turns out adenoids are capable of regrowing. I was in the hospital bed, obsessed with the giant crack in the wall, and the toy model X-wing fighter my family got for me. I loved that X-wing until I got the Millennium Falcon, and then, well, it wasn't a fair competition.