Memories
Scallop Harvesting
Have you ever heard of Niantic Bay? We used to go catch scallops (they are like a clam, but their shell is shaped like the shell gas logo with the ribs) - I'd go out in the row boat with my dad and he'd go out to the front of the boat with the net. He'd scrape along the bottom of the ocean and then throw the full net back to the other end of the boat where I was. There was an old door (forming a crude table) across the boat and I would pick out all the scallops, put them in a basket, and take the rest of the debris and wipe it in the ocean. We'd do it again and we'd sit there the whole afternoon until we got a bushel of scallops. We'd listen to the Boston Red Socks game on the transistor radio and once in a while we'd take out his pocket knife and open up a few scallops and eat them raw out of the shell. I think excessive amounts of mercury erased the remainder of the memory.
Orange Bubbles
I remember my father taking me out to Montauk Point, Long Island at night, to watch the orange bubbles on the horizon. I found out later in life that the bubbles were German U-boats torpedoing Liberty ships. They wouldn't shut the lights off because they didn't want the citizens to feel like we were at war so any ship was like a sitting duck. I was about four or five.
My father & I
I remember quite vividly falling backward repeatedly from my child-size chair. I remember not understanding why after such careful adjustments, my seat would keep on plummeting up and back while my newly developed sense of gravity told me that if anything, I should be falling forward and down the slope……. Little did I know that my father took much pleasure in seeing me struggle with this unexplainable event which made him keep pushing my chair backward over and over and over...
Tea Party with Superman
A tea party with my two sisters. 1981. Taumarunui, New Zealand. My superman top was fraying badly but I seem to recall that I loved it nevertheless.
A Bitter Embrace
Here you see 2 first cousins, each of us an only-child, wrapped in a reluctant embrace with undertones of extreme ickiness. The two of us -- I, Graham and she, Chizuko -- had been brought together by our parents to play together on a foggy Saturday in Japantown, San Francisco. We usually looked forward to these play dates, since they gave us a break from thinking about the Iran-Contra Affair, but inevitably our interaction reduced to pushing and squabbling. On the day documented here, she and I were engaging a petty debate over the distribution of toys and the choice of watching 'Star Wars' as opposed to 'Rainbow Brite.' Then, quite abruptly, one of our parents (who had been oblivious to our bickering) decided it would be "so cute" to arrange us next to one another for a Kodak moment. They placed my arm around hers, and obviously forced me to wear this outlandish sweater as if I was a doll in a playhouse. When the commemorative photo was snapped their contrivance was complete, but the looks on our faces tell the real story of that bleak afternoon.
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