My Life: Glenridge Upstairs

Like much of my childhood, my recollections of the years before nursery school have blended with stories from my parents and photographs of that time.  I read from many experts on memory that the more you remember something, the less concrete the original memory becomes.  It, in essence, becomes replaced by each recollection of it.  A group of something close to eight sets of parents became friends through a childbearing class, and stayed friends long afterward.  These other children, who were born within a year of my own birth, were my first friends.  For the early years of my life this small community got together at their children’s birthday parties to reminisce and share similar stories.  Over time the families went their separate ways.  By the time I began going to nursery school I only saw them very rarely.  A new set of friends was coming into my life, some of which I still have.

Glenridge is a wide, two story building nestled in Glen Canyon near a creek that almost drowns out the sound of cars that pass by less than a mile away.  To me, this canyon was a vast wilderness of trails, hills, hikes, trees, and the footprints of giants.  The building is built into a hill, so that you can enter at the first floor or, around back, the second.  As I remember it, the younger children of 3 and 4 years old, spent their day upstairs in a large room of books, carpets, toys, and other normal things you’d find in a place of small children.  Just outside the door sat even rows of green picnic tables, and just behind them a path that led up the rest of the hill.  If one walked along the picnic tables to the end of the building, one could walk out onto the deck that wrapped around to the front of the school.  From there I could look down at the creek and road, but still look up at the eucalyptus leaves shivering gently in the wind.  I could survey the land to the left, which was closed off where the trail entered a small forest of trees, blackberry bushes and thickets.  In front of me, past the eucalyptus, the smell of which still sends me back to those days, I could look up the massive hill.  To the right the land opened up on an area called the Meeting Circle, where rows of logs surrounded a large campfire.  I remember waking along and trying to balance on these large logs, at least 2 feet in diameter, for hours at a time.  Beneath the eucalyptus ran the creek, which came through the canyon from the left, and extended to the right toward Glen Park, and the city.  I can’t recall where this creek ends, but there must be some place it drains because in my mind it seems to simply expire just before the baseball fields begin.  Just on the other side of and running parallel to the creek is the dirt road, the lifeline from the city, the only way to drive into the canyon from O'Shaughnessy.  This is where we were dropped off in the morning and picked up at lunchtime.  It was here, in the morning program, that I leaned that men could be nurses and women doctors, but I don’t know when I ever got the idea that they couldn’t.  It must have been a combination of what I saw on television and commercials and the fact that my doctor and dentist were male.  What other ideas about the world I picked up in my first few years I don’t know, nor which of those have survived, in some form to this day.  I only know the ones I later realized.  Men are taller than women, people marry within their race, every couple has to get divorced at some point, L.A. was a different city form Los Angeles, one God was better than many, China was the leader of the countries in Asia, girls didn’t have penises, but little slits that seemed nothing more than the absence of a penis.  I’m sure there are many more such views of the world that I incurred during these times that I have not given much thought.  Adults are more likely to do what I want if I ask nicely.  If my skin is cut I bleed.  The food I eat becomes my own poop and if my stomach hurts pooping usually makes it felt better.  My mind is different from my mother’s and father’s.  They don’t tell me everything, but I can keep secrets from them.  I’m not suppose to drink water after 7pm because I wet the bed, but if I take a sip while no one I around they won’t know.  This idea that my thoughts were my own was often confusing, because often my father did know, channeling some mental telepathy he would never admit believing in, or reading my thoughts as I eyed a half full glass and then offered to take it to the sink.