Earliest Memory (About)

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I had gone with my grandmother to some social security office in southern California. I would guess I was roughly four at the time. When my father and mother dissolved their union (an odd way to refer to marriage), my father moved into my grandmother’s house, my mother’s mom, because she became my regular babysitter, and my dad, who worked the majority of the day, felt he needed to be closer to me. I remember this place with great deal of detail because I spent much of my life there, and still visit as often as I can. It's a place simultaneously full of trauma, mostly other’s trauma, and family; nostalgia has a weird way of ignoring misery.

 

While at the social security offices we had to take an elevator to a higher floor. My grandmother, I assume at my insistence, let me bring some toy which exists now only as color in my peripheral: red and yellow.  While in the elevator, I played in a corner, on the ground, and my grandmother, in a moment of forgetfulness, left without me. I, being quite young and unaware, hadn’t noticed she was gone until the doors were closed. From there I went into some kind of panic, got out on some floor shortly after, and started making more noise than I think I have ever made since. I remember a series of walking suites and voices, some comforting, some irritated, and then my crying grandmother holding me. The time it took, and the way it passed, is lost to me now, but those images remain mildly vivid.