Hard memories

It started so innocently. My niece posted pictures of her new baby on facebook. So I signed up on facebook and people started finding me. Some were people I knew in childhood. One man posted a picture of some neighborhood children. The comments grew and grew until we were talking of all those we lost back in the day. Not from Viet Nam; we lost them to drugs. I have received several beautiful private notes and they make me so sad. Because I remember the little girl who could not understand light hearted teasing and differentiate it from the threat of violence that was always a background to her days. How scared I must have been. I still do not do well with teasing that has a mean undercurrent. However, I love sarcasm and irony. Go figure.

One boy and his brother were what I perceived at the time to have been very mean. They scared me, a lot. They were very good looking blonde boys, one my age, one a year older. Looking back I can see their parents were much younger than mine. I wonder about those children because their mother was nasty to me and their father innappropriate. I wonder about what went on in that apartment.

Between the ages of six until nearly eight, I was a motherless child. Maybe I scared the neighborhood women, a living reminder of what could happen to their own children. Most were kind to me. I remember my friend asking if I could walk to the store with her mother and another woman. The other woman looked at me in a sunsuit and said "I'm not taking her, she's half naked." She could have said to please get a sweater but instead she humiliated me. I don't remember much from those years, but I remember that and the child inside me weeps. When I was about twelve my friend asked the husband of this woman if he had the time. He looked at us and leered "Yeah, but do you have the place?" My friend and I looked at each other. These days we would say "wtf?" but back then we were confused and creeped out. Yeah, these were the parents of two of the boys that scared me. Now I look at one of those boys and see he is a really decent human being. I looked at his friends and he has traveled far and wide.

We have talked about those friends who have died and I am saddened for all the lives cut short. I mourn that my children never got to know the cousins they would have had if my brother had lived. I think about Mrs. Kiroki living so many years without Mary Ann and her husband. The cutest boys in the neighborhood died of overdoses. And there I was, knowing I had to get away. I did get away. I have traveled around the US. I will probably never live in NY again, not in Canarsie to be sure. It seems that was a whole lifetime ago, I hardly remember it, but the bad memories, some of them I remember way too clearly.