The Best Years of Life

Childhood is short. There’s just ten years or so of it, from two to twelve at the most. That’s not long from my point of view.

Ten years, fifteen. When I look back at my life, my friendships, the cities and villages I’ve lived in, I see that I give the most credit to those early years.

Why does childhood matter so much? Because those years were the archetype for the rest of my life. They set me on my particular path and taught me where to seek safety, warmth and space.

Childhood signed my consciousness with an indelible pen. The shape of my tall father coming into the house, the contrast of sunlight on the floor and shadows at night. The vertical panic of the airy stairwell and the moist, warm aromas of kitchen. The stillness of grass in winter. For all my life I have compared every other man to Father, every woman to Mother and every house to that first house.

I’m not saying the comparisons are odious. This is not a moral or Freudian concern, this is a mirror I hold up to see back to then.

First impressions embed in us like the Ten Commandments. The first sounds are the basic musical patterns laid down on my mind. Voices, dogs barking, the car starting up, crunching away down the drive.

The look and feel of the outer world on my body. The miracle of tadpoles in the spring ditch below my grammar school and the lush May grass that grew thick on the banks. Forty, fifty years later as my horse pulls toward just such delicious, green grass beside the Santa Fe River, at the end of my driveway, I am again six years old on my belly in that same sweet fodder.

The long path of my life has been filled with joy and terror, pleasure and pain but childhood images are the brightest. Recent memory has to fight for space on top of all the layers.

It’s not so important to remember where my keys are in the grand scale of my life. But to recall how my mother sewed me prom dresses at the dining room table--if I have to choose between the keys and the dresses, well..

The longer I live, the fewer contemporaries are left to corroborate my history. A really good reason to keep old friends. Stay married, if you can.

Damn.

What’s ten years when you’re almost seventy? I’ve forgotten whole chunks of time in my life. I don’t recall my infancy--I don't care who held the bottle. I’m forgetting the humiliations of my youth, my first marriage, the boyfriends, movies, books, trips. I’ve even forgotten articles I’ve written although they look pretty good now when I come across one.

But my childhood—that’s ten Technicolor years.

It’s your childhood. And it’s not too late to make it a happy one.