Food Memoirs, One

My first food-related memory involves not food but my brother. I am three, about, and my grandpa has picked me up in the truck.

I’ll digress to point out that this truck seemed exotic to us when we were kids. It was silver, and it was like a moving fort. Many are the afternoons I spent as a child, fishing off the back of the truck, holding a stick with a string tied to it and, occasionally, an open safety pin hooked on the end, the better to up the danger factor and make the experience “more real.”

It was also exotic to be riding alone with my grandfather in the truck. He was fetching me from a neighbor’s house, a neighbor chosen because their possessions included a chubby little girl just my age.

Even at three, I knew these people had more money than us, and I felt the slight deference this afforded. The dad’s name was Claude; the one exotic thing about him was an intense black moustache, and he was not as friendly as my dad, which had to do with being rich.

I think while I was at their house, I rode a horse.

My grandfather was taking me home to my house, to the sweet little starter home in the clean child-friendly neighborhood on the hill that my parents bought with an FHA loan. At the house, my parents would be back, and with them would be the new brother I’d visited in the hospital, or rather had gazed at vaguely from behind glass. The most impressive thing about the hospital, as far as I was concerned, was they they’d given me a bendy-straw. I thought the accordian-pleated collar that let the straw bend was the most marvelous piece of engineering.

Because I was three, my impressions do not include anything anybody said, just some colors and feelings. As my grandfather and I climbed the hill in the exotic silver Ford farm truck on the bench seat covered in green vinyl, I felt anticipation, because little kids are led to understand that a new brother or sister is like a treat! Basically like a live doll! For them!

Then we are in the living room of the little 3-bedroom home on the hill, from which my earliest memories date. (There had been a couple of previous homes, including one with impressive pillars, but these I don’t remember, except from a couple of pictures in which my parents are dressed incredibly hip: bells and fur-trimmed jackets and so forth.) Everyone was back and so forth. It was dark: as a child, I was convinced that we conducted all important events at my house in the dead of night, like gypsies. We opened presents in the middle of the night; we hosted gatherings in the middle of the night. It must have been the first winter I’d understood anything about the world, and in this new cognizance I’d not yet learned that darkness comes in the morning and evening, not just late at night.

Lamps were lit and grownups were cooing. The bassinet was in the middle of room, and in the bassinet in a yellow shawl was the brother.

I peered in at it. All that was visible in the yellow roll was the head. I thought of a kind of meat I didn’t eat but had seen hanging at the supermarket. I thought: It looks like a pimento loaf.