| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | There's a lot of them, so it's hard to choose.
I used to ask my mom why my paternal grandmother didn't get down on the floor and wrestle with me like my maternal one, and she would just shrug her shoulders and say, "Well [your paternal grandmother] bakes with you and shows you flowers in the garden. So she just has different things she does than [your maternal grandmother]." I can remember my Nana, who was my maternal grandmother, laughing this smoker's cough of a laugh when I would get up on the back of the chair and noogie her white hair. She used to sit mostly at the end of her dining room table, which had a tablecloth stained by teabags that had fallen off their saucers, and with an ashtray nearby to smoke her favorite Camels. When I was in kindergarten, my Nana's health took a pretty hard spill from all the smoking, and she was stuck in the house for the next several years. My kindergarten class walked over with the teacher from the school to visit her, and somewhere hopefully not eaten away by moths is a video of that trip in my mom's house. I can remember the walk over, even down to which streets we took (I got excited because we also walked past my uncle and aunt's house). I was used to climbing the outer part of the steps to my grandmother's, , and I proceeded to do so and to hang from the railing when I got there, until somebody told me, "Hey, you can't do that. This is a school trip."
My paternal grandmother really did spend a tremendous amount of time with me baking and growing flowers. She was especially into daylilies, and my great uncle, her younger brother, made a beautiful painting of the pathway of daylilly varieties she has along the side of her garage in her backyard. There's this one daylily that is still along the side of her house, and when I visit her today she still likes to remind me of how when it first bloomed I went over to it as a little kid, sniffed it, looked fascinatingly at it, and then said, "Oh, Grandmom. This looks just like toilet paper". And what I meant was that it looked like the really fancy, frilly toilet paper you buy that has all the ruffles and patterns in it, because it really did look like that. It was ruffled and complicated and had this kind of cream white color to it. My grandmother loved that, and she loves it still.
My Nana really couldn't ever make it to Grandparents Day, but my Grandmom made it every year. I can really remember very vividly those trips. Somewhere from one of those trips, the local newspaper came in and did a photo of us sitting together, and I was thinking about how much a child's ego is built up by little fluff pieces like that in an inconsequential local newspaper. You sort of tell yourself that you've been covered because your grandmother is the best (But she is, right?).
I remember going to an orchard with one of my Aunts in early fall, and how crisp and cold things were, and the giant pumpkin-headed scarecrows, and the octagonal barn that is no longer there because it burnt down. I remember going down the shore with my Aunt and my cousin buying me a stuffed Mario doll that I walked around the boardwalk with.
When my sister was born, I remember being over my Nana's house waiting for it all to go down at the hospital. My cousin was there, and I was very young. I remember telling my Nana I was thirsty and she sort of ordered my cousin to go get me water, and when he came back with the cup it was full of hot water, which I complained about, and I can remember her yelling at me. My aunt came through the door late at night and gave me The Land Before Time because my sister had been born.
My brother was born a few years later, and my grandmother and aunt stayed in the house with us and slept in my parents bed because they were at the hospital. My brother was born in the early morning, I think. I remember getting a pin that said I was a big brother and going around the classroom in first grade to say how proud I was of this. This kid who was kind of a macho bully told me "No one cares about your brother" and that upset me considerably for the rest of the day. My first grade teacher spent a lot of time talking me down from being upset about that.
I feel like those are just a few memories, and maybe not even the most important one or the best ones, but certainly among the more important ones I have. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | My aunt, she had the same birthday as me. She had juvenile diabetes from a time when they didn't really know well how to treat it, so it took a toll on her and she died when I was four. But I identified a lot with her growing up, and I think I still do. I was always told that I was stubborn like she was.
My aunt took the trolley everywhere, and she made friends with everyone she met on transit. I became really interested in extending the transit system as an adult, and there's one trolley in our system that was kind of "my aunt's trolley" that I feel special attachment to. I was always told that my aunt had an unusually diverse group of friends for a woman of her generation, because of her trolley riding and the fact that she talked to everyone. I think the disability she faced at times due to her juvenile diabetes influenced the way that she interacted with people. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | I don't know if this is the funniest thing, but it's funny enough. I was getting Chinese food with family on the 4th of July and a firecracker went off on the street, and I jumped so low to the ground that when my sister turned around she went, "Where'd [my name] go?" And then she realized that I had thought it was a gunshot and everyone started to laugh. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I'd like to see Amsterdam and Copenhagen. I liked biking a lot and I feel like those are the places to go, par excellence. I also wouldn't mind seeing Ireland. My great great grandfather was born in northwestern Ireland, and those areas of Ireland are still Gaeltachts to a great extent. |
