Memories of Childhood

                         Change of Venue

I was warm and cosy; it was comfy and familiar.

Then the terror started;

constriction replaced cosiness;

the whole of everything gripped me tightly all over;

I felt the need to breathe but couldn’t

as forces I didn’t understand

squeezed me, frightened, powerless,

in an unknown direction,

roaring in my ears,

until, until … suddenly

All the lights came on,

light, light – light as I’d never known it,

illuminating innumerable unfamiliar, blurry shapes,

accompanied by a strange cacophony of undifferentiated noises

that surrounded me as I sucked in sweet, moist air;

then I began to distinguish human voices

speaking language I didn’t understand,

seeming to say things around me rather than to me.

Then came hunger.

               Loez’m Su Ruhe

When I was little,

from the dawn of memory

until my daddy died

when I was nine-and-a-half,

my parents spoke Yiddish

when they didn’t want

me to understand

what they were saying.

I picked up a few words, of course,

as children do,

and the most beautiful Yiddish phrase of all,

which only my daddy said,

is what he said

when he heard my mother

verbally abusing me.

I don’t know if this is accurate,

but I remember it as,

“Loez’m su ruhe” –

which translates roughly as,

“Let him have peace.”

         Childhood Heaven

When I was small I had a definite idea

of what heaven is like.

It’s lying face-down

on eternally cool pillows

whilst eating an eternal black olive

and cutting an eternal fart.

      Mushrooms & Street Running

Kennett Square,

a country town with about five or six thousand inhabitants,

is the centre of an industry

that each week grows and processes

about a half a million kilos

of mushrooms.

My daddy used to love to take us

to a Kennett Square restaurant

called the Kennett Kandy Kitchen

which was less than an hour’s drive from home,

because he loved their mushroom soup.

Once, when I was – I don’t know –

somewhere between maybe five and seven,

when we were leaving the restaurant,

I dashed, as little kids do,

across State Street,

Kennett’s main drag,

toward my daddy’s Studebaker.

I tripped and remember seeing

a car’s headlights bearing down on me.

Obviously, it stopped in time.

My daddy picked me up and comforted me,

as I was a bit shaken.

My mother made it clear

that running across the street

made me a bad boy,

and that I’d done it just to scare her,

and I was never to do it again.

Now, more than sixty years later,

I hardly ever run at all,

but when I do it’s across streets.

                        Measurements

I remember when I was in late childhood

and early adolescence,

awaiting my late-arriving puberty,

reading, and hearing, and seeing stuff on TV

about women’s ‘measurements’,

always expressed in three numbers,

which I soon learnt were the circumference

– in inches –

of a woman’s bust, waist, and hips,

respectively.

These represented what I learnt was called her ‘figure’.

I learnt that the first measurement was best

when the number was in the upper-mid-thirties,

thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight

being the most worthy of admiration.

With the second measurement I learnt that smaller was better,

the optimal number being in the low-to-mid-twenties,

although people raved about some movie actress

who had an almost-magical eighteen-inch waist.

I also learnt that the closer the third measurement

was to the first one the better.

Measurements of thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six

seemed to represent a particularly praiseworthy figure.

I took all this in unquestioningly,

as it came to me as a matter of course.

I didn’t even wonder at the time

why I never heard anything

about men’s measurements.

             Dama de España

When I was eight or nine or ten

or something like that,

somebody taught me a naughty parody

of the ever-popular accordionists’ favourite

that went:

      ‘ Lady of Spain I adore you

       Pull down your pants I’ll explore you’

followed by a paroxysm or three of giggling.

I wonder if that helped to prepare me for adulthood.

Well, at least it was able to prompt

my horrid mother into displaying disapproval.

Giggle.

                                The Facts

I, similarly to most males

in the developed world,

I imagine,

did not learn about sex and reproduction

from my parents

or from classroom lessons in Health, or whatever they call it now.

I learnt it from

that omnipresent consortium

of social arbiters known as the guys –

also known as the blokes, the chaps, los chicos, los muchachos,

les gars, i tipi, die Jungs, otoko, rebyata, killarana, de fyre, and so on.

Or, otherwise, what polite folk call,

‘out on the street,’

where things are so,

well, seamy.

Only in my case

it wasn’t a street but a driveway.

I was trying to shoot baskets

into the hoop over our garage door,

with my eight-year-old mate Davy Lowrey,

and in regard to a dirty joke that I really didn’t understand,

I asked him if people really did, y’know – giggle,

y’know, actually-really, y’know, fuck?

He told me, sure,

that’s how people have babies,

and it all clicked together in my mind.

When I’d asked my mother about babies’ origins

she’d told me that the father plants a seed.

I’d asked her if he got that kind of seed

at Richardson’s Variety Store,

down the street,

and she’d told me to go outside and play.

                 Lawn Mowing

I started mowing the family lawn when I was eight

with an old muscle-powered reel mower.

My daddy would give me something like

fifty cents or a dollar every time I did it.

After he died the job remained mine,

but my mother didn’t pay me.

It was just one of the chores

that I had to do, and that was that.

When I was thirteen I bought a rotary power mower

with the money I’d received at my bar mitzvah.

It made the chore almost enjoyable –

I tried to keep the pattern of mowed and unmowed lawn

aesthetically pleasing to me as I went.

Mowing the lawn remained my job,

and my ongoing aesthetic challenge,

throughout all my domestic situations;

I don’t think either of my daughters has ever mowed one,

and none of my partners ever did

when they were with me.

When the old second-hand mower

that I’d bought in 1989 in Otorohanga

from Duncan Trott, the radio comedian’s dad,

finally died in 2005,

I started paying an old bloke

fifteen bucks to mow the tiny lawn

of the house I’d moved to in Frankton

whenever it needed it.

The place I live in as I compose this

has no lawn at all – just patios front and back.

I like that.

              I Wanted to be a Beatnik When I Grew Up

The first time a verse I’d written

outraged somebody

was in 1959, when I was 12 or 13.

It was a free-verse, rationalist, semi-existentialist, nihilist opus –

I think I entitled it ‘Nothing’ or something like that –

about how there’s no intrinsic reason for anything to exist.

My English teacher,

Miss Knodel,

who had a funny, not-quite-Scandinavian accent

and who’d probably wanted a sonnet,

or something like that,

thought it horrible that a child my age

could write such hope-less stuff,

and wrote all over the margins

a whole load of rubbish

about how God gives meaning to everything.

I felt smug,

a feeling I’ve rarely had since,

and never respected her again.

At least one thing became established:

when I became a beatnik

I wasn’t going to be the one playing the bongos,

which was a good thing,

because I had a pair of ’em

and although I’d had no tuition,

had become convinced that

I was shit at it.