Sensory Childhood
I’ve just returned from visiting my parents. They still live in the house I grew up in, and every time I visit them, I re-enter the country of my childhood. The old neighborhood has changed some in these fifty years – many of the little bungalows have pushed up second stories, the wide canopies of elm trees had to be cut down, and the empty lots where we played hide-and-seek have been built up. But the streets still form the ancestral map, running the exact same directions toward the exact same train tracks. Walking those streets is a multi-layered kinesthetic experience of memory.
Walking is an activity that creates a kind of automatic brain integration. As the right leg swings forward, the left side of the brain is activated. As the left leg strides ahead, the right side of the brain fires. In a chicken-or-egg reversal, we can also say that the right brain controls the muscles of the left side of the body, and vice versa.
The even motion of the body walking both creates, and is created by, an equal opposite rhythm in the brain. Right foot, left, foot = left brain, right brain. This draws a continuously forming “X” between body and brain. It integrates the whole body/brain system, and brings us back to center.
Repetition breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds recognition. As a child, I walked those streets to the elementary school for the nine o’clock bell, and back at noon for lunch. I walked back for class at 1:15, and walked home again at 3:15. It added up to about a mile and a half a day, five days a week, ten months a year, for six years. I know those streets.
As I walked them again last week, I had the fascinating experience of being in the present time – carefully avoiding the patches of ice on the broken sidewalk as I walked past the newly remodeled houses – and simultaneously being in a shifting dimension of memory. Memory felt like a magical garment I was wearing draped over my shoulders – if I let myself, I could be five years old. . .
The bright playground equipment dissolves, and I am walking past the past scrubby high grass and bits of trash of the empty lot that was here in 1961. Big first-grader Patsy tells me that a witch died there in that field – “Look!” she says, “There are her slippers!” I am filled with confusion and fear, and the urge to run the two blocks home to my ever-so-normal mom as fast as I can. But I don’t dare.
Instead of walking past a brick office building with a “FOR RENT” sign outside, I am a fifth-grader walking past the evergreen hedge next to the doctor’s office where my grandma works as a receptionist – and I see a little miracle. A paperback book is sitting in the branches of the tree! It is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool. I debate about leaving it there or taking it home as a prize. (I’ll have to look and see if it is still on my mother’s bookshelf).
I am a second-grader walking down the block to my house, looking to see if any of the neighborhood kids are out, ready to play – hopscotch and jacks on the sidewalk, and kickball in my backyard hide-and-seek in the empty lot across the street . . .
The adult on the walk, sea-changing through these childhood memories, is filled with wonder. The vividness of these experiences so far surpasses anything I experience in my ordinary daily life as a grown-up. I imagine getting out of the car at the parking lot and walking to my office – and the feeling is not so very resonant. I have to struggle with my memory to feel the air, or hear the sounds. What I most experience is the activity of my own mind. As the pilot says to the little prince, as he desperately tries to fix his broken plane in the desert, “I am busy with matters of consequence!”
Walking these streets, I am so grateful for the complete sensory diet I experienced as a child. Although I can still tell you which cartoon was on which night, I was only allowed to watch a half hour of TV a day. I did not spend my childhood in the two-dimensional, virtual reality of screens and buttons, beeps and flickers. I wonder what experiences children today will carry into adulthood.
Comments
Interestingly enough, I was back for a visit in May, and I noticed a school bus waiting on the corner with elementary school-aged kids filing into it . . . I talked to one of the moms, who said, “The rule is, west of the tracks, they take the bus.” I said, “We always had a crossing guard.” She shrugged. So the kids in my old neighborhood are walking a few feet and riding a bus . . . they’ll have very different memories than mine - and get a lot less exercise!
Dortha Jun 08, 2011
Fell out of bed feeling down. This has brightened my day!