Mary Belk: Old age can open your eyes to childhood

Southern writer Flannery O’Connor said that if we survived childhood we have enough writing material to last a lifetime. But I’m not so sure.

I don’t remember huge chunks of my past. Whole days, months and years are missing so that my life, in retrospect, resembles a loosely woven afghan that’s been gnawed by an Airedale.

When I recall happenings that are recorded in snapshots, I have to wonder—is it the event I remember or the black-and-white photo?

I can conjure up only one clear memory of kindergarten. The classroom was in the basement of the brick school building and when there was a fire drill, a big mahogany-colored man opened the ground-level window and lifted us out one by one. So much for the idea that everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten. Then again, maybe the all-important truth I learned was that in times of crisis, I can always count on the “big man upstairs” to pull me through.

I tend to remember the good times and the bad. I recollect those childhood hurts, the days when sticks and stones may break your bones, but words hurt worse than anything. I can call up memories of chicken pox and tonsillitis, my older sisters leaving home, the tornado that twisted through Auburn in 1952, the night our white German Shepherd was poisoned, and waiting in the cold corridors of the school for our once-a-year tetanus and typhoid shots.

But I can close my eyes and stomp through the happy days too. Trips to the beach and summers at our rock cabin overlooking the Chattahoochee River, tossing a baseball at Felton Little Park, my siblings coming home for Christmas, and the night Sambo, our Cocker Spaniel, was born.

It’s the uneventful, ordinary days that are as foggy as a Smoky Mountain morning. My total memories of grammar school wouldn’t fill a demitasse cup. And those high school years when every hour seemed an eternity have become a blur.

Seems the things I do recall are nudged by my senses. I can still hear symphonies we played in band and almost taste an apple pie we made in home economics class, an apple pie made without apples. I can feel my fingers flitting away on timed typing tests, and I can hear Mr. Guthrey, my physics teacher, saying, “Bring your workbook on up here, little Adams girl. If you were here now you’d be late.”

Sometimes when I walk into a room, I get a certain feeling. Then I remember back until I see exactly what it was that caused the emotion. I remember what the noises and smells were and what was said. I recall sounds I heard in the morning when I woke up and what kept me awake at night.

I’ve heard that in old age memories of one’s childhood become clearer. I look forward to that time when the ragged afghan of my past becomes a colorful patchwork quilt.

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.