My Early Years, as Told to Me

Children usually don't have many memories until they acquire language. I think this was true for me. What I know of my very early years comes from stories that were told to me by my parents or other relatives. There were stories about me when I was around the age of one, when I was walking and eating solid food (apparently my mother didn't breast-feed for long, because that wasn't the "modern" thing to do). Some of the stories are funny; some of the stories worry me a little because they make me wonder what was really going on behind the truth of the story. A funny story first: My parents liked Italian food, and Utica had many good Italian restaurants due to the influx of Italian immigrants after World Wars I and II. They would often take me with them to their favorite Italian restaurant, and order me a small bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce, and when I'd had enough to eat, I would dump the remainder to the spaghetti on my head! I was also in my pajamas. I must have looked lovely, sitting in the high chair in my pajamas with spaghetti with marinara sauce streaming down my hair and face, but it was a good signal that I had finished eating, don't you think?

The next story is not quite so funny. We lived on the second floor (the top flat) of a two-story flat at 1603 Holland Avenue in Utica, New York. In the Northeastern United States, these types of houses were very common; it was as if there were two house stuck one on top of another; each was called a flat. When my father would leave home each morning to go to hid teaching job a few blocks away at Utica Free Academy (where he was a building construction teacher and where he and his brothers had attended high school), I would run down the stairs toward the door after him in my pajamas after him screaming and crying," Daddy! Don't go! Don't go, Daddy!" My mother would retrieve me from the bottom of the stairs, and I would sob all the way back to our flat. And, she later told me, she would cry and I would cry for hours. Apparently, my mother was quite unhappy or depressed. She didn't really know anyone in the city except for my grandparents and my Aunt Elsie, her best friend from Virginia and my two uncles. My mother was a very gregarious person and being cooped up in the house with a baby must have been torture for her. When I was a much younger baby, maybe 3-4 months old, she tols me, when my father left for school, I would cry and she would cry, all day long. She must have been depressed, but in those days, no one talked about depression. She really couldn't call her family in Virginia, because that was very expensive.

My mother never talked to me much about my earliest childhood, but when she did, it always involved her crying and being unhappy and feeling alone and isolated. There were no places for young mothers to go and do things. On the weekends, my father and his father were building our house on Valley View Road in New Hartford, which was just a few miles away from our flat and from my grandparents' house on Storrs Avenue in Utica. It was also near my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob's house on Sunset Ave. Later they moved to Thieme Place; still later they moved about 20 miles away to Vernon, NY to be closer to Uncle Bob's work at Griffis Air Base where he was a civilian engineer. The only "outsiders" we visited when I was this young age were my dad's supervisor and his wife, Henry and Jo Guilfoyle who lived down the street on Holland Ave from us. Their daughter Connie babysat for me and took me to the movies.

Usually, whenever, we went to visit someone, I went with my parents. They would bring a big navy blue blanket and put it on the floor, and put me on the blanket. I would curl up on it and go to sleep with my toy cat. When it was time to go, my parents would bundle me up in the blanket to take me home. Later on, that same blanket became the blanket that was used on my bed. That blanket, though threadbare, lasted a very long time. There were some spots that were picked nearly clean through where I had soothed myself to sleep, but the blanket just kept on being used just for me.