Early Memories

San Francisco, California

February 2, 1870

Abel’s first memory was of a move. He must have been two years old. They were leaving their old house—small, drafty, set against the hills south of San Francisco—for a new home in Palo Alto. The memory came in fragments: sunlight bouncing off wooden crates stacked high on the sidewalk, the sharp scent of dust kicked up by shifting furniture, voices calling instructions back and forth. He had wanted to help. A small table, short and slightly built, seemed like something he could carry out to the waiting wagon.

Someone stopped him—Tina, his cousin, maybe. She bent down, took the table from his hands, and gently replaced it with a bundle of rolled-up blankets. Or perhaps it had been a rug. He wasn’t sure. In his mind, it was always a rug. The memory had the hazy edges of something half-remembered, reshaped by time. He thought he might have been miffed at the exchange, his two-year-old pride dented. But that, too, was unclear.

His next clear memory came when he was four. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his mother and father, sunlight pouring in from the narrow window above the sink. He didn’t remember the food, or what had been said before—only that he had announced, “I’m four. It’s my birthday.”

His mother had smiled. “You’re four.”

His father had nodded. “That’s right.”

That was as close as he had ever come to a birthday party, at least for many years. No cake, no candles, no great celebration—just the quiet, regular ackno that time was passing.

There was another memory from around that time, one he recalled with more feeling. He had been curled against his mother’s side, in the warmth of his parents’ bed, his small body pressed into the familiar shape of her. He had slept with them often at that age, seeking comfort in the quiet hours of the night. He remembered, vaguely, the moment that changed—when his father decided it was time for him to sleep in his own bed.

His mother had told him of the change while they were in the carriage, the wheels rattling over cobblestones as they rode through the city. She had said, gently, that things had to change. He had accepted it in the way children do—not fully understanding, but knowing that the world was shifting around him in ways he could not control. He had been sad, though he had no words for it then.

Their carriage, he remembered, had been a dark blue surrey with a fringed top, the kind his father swore by. A good family wagon, sturdy, with enough space to haul the day’s purchases from the market. He remembered another trip in it, a year later—his mother driving him and a few other children from school on an outing along an old tree-lined road, though the destination was lost to time.

Among the children in the carriage was a girl named Shannon, his first sweetheart. They had both been five, and she had been small and bright, with long blonde hair and a snaggle-toothed grin that made her look perpetually mischievous. On that day, it had been cold, and in a gesture of chivalry, he had taken off his little black jacket and draped it over her legs. It had seemed important, noble even, the way he had done it.

The next memory of Shannon was their parting. They had been outside the schoolyard, in the sand lot behind the main building. There had been no grass there, just the wide stretch of earth where children dug trenches with sticks and built small, crumbling castles. He did not know if they had argued or if things had simply run their course, but at some point, they had looked at one another and agreed that they were no longer sweethearts. The end had been quiet and unceremonious- a matter of fact.

Years passed before he saw her again. She had left the school, moved across the city to attend another. Then, one day, when Abel was nine, a group of students from her new school visited his. He had spotted her immediately, standing in the schoolyard in a red woolen sweater, her hair longer now, her face more familiar than he had expected it to be.

Something overtook him then—a shyness, a nervousness he couldn’t place. He had watched her from a distance, uncertain, until a teacher placed a hand on his shoulder and asked, “Is something wrong?”

He had shaken his head, but even now, years later, he wasn’t sure what the answer had been. 

Why had he been so nervous? And wasn’t there an element of the performative in his nervousness- a desire for some great emotion, requiring only the situation and set of people into which the longed-for feeling could be placed? As an older person, looking backwards thirty years, he would think that even then, as a child, he had thought so a little.