Playground I

Croatia

My earliest memories of life date back to when I was three years old. Anything that came before is epitomized by a single freeze-frame visual: the front steps of my house, with the second step at about eye level. This means I was probably seventeen months old or so; perhaps I had just learned to stand on my own, or was propping myself up on the lampost in our front yard.

But my first true, lucid memories begin at age three in a country that no longer exists. I was living in Yugoslavia because my parents were insane. My father had the ridculous notion that he must travel to Slavic countries in order to study Slavic culture, so the autumn of 1979 found the three of us taking up residence in a Zagreb high rise.

All I remember of the apartment was its basic blocky layout and four of my possessions: a Sesame Street poster, a blue plastic sports car with a translucent purple windshield that opened, colored plastic blocks which were crude Eastern European approximations of Legos, and a teddy bear hand puppet named Sasha (Russian for Alexander).

The kitchen was small and I remember three things about it: eating cornflakes in the morning and looking out the window at my father walking away from the building on the sidewalk below, singing �Tea For Two� with my mother while I drank tea, and looking at an issue of Time magazine with Teddy Roosevelt (for some reason) on the cover.

I had a playmate named Andre. He knew about two words in English and I knew about two words in Croatian, so our playtime was largely non-verbal. Though I have understandably ablated such memories, my mother maintains that Andre was a little beast who was always hurting me and making me cry. Apparently he once stabbed his father with a fork at dinner. This same father would sit in the park outside our building and give us pear slices.

I wonder what Andre is doing now.

I remember eating hard boiled eggs during a train ride to Split and a Christmas visit to Paris, where my mother�s sister Mary and her husband Greg were living at the time. I remember their apartment being small. On Christmas morning I woke up when my father did and sat quietly with him in the kitchen for several hours, drinking tea and looking at the newspaper. I had forgotten it was Christmas. He had to bring me out into the living room where the tree and presents were, and remind me.

That year for Christmas I got a plastic toy boat. It was a large ferry with little toy cars. Whether it was meant to be taken into the tub or not, it and most of my other toys eventually went into the water. I also got a wind-up plastic bird which Greg and I played with in a nearby park. This park also had an elaborate carousel which boasted not only horses but motorcycles, stagecoaches, and flying saucers. I made friends with a little Asian boy there. I decided his name was �Japanese� and I called him that the rest of the day.

Greg worked for CBS Records at the time, and my early introduction to music took place in their listening room. I became quite fond of the just-released Muppet Movie soundtrack as well as their Beatles collection. I remember watching �Sesame Street� there, but it was some European version in a language I didn�t understand. Oscar The Grouch was blue and played the trumpet.

Mary still has the �radio� I made, which was a cardboard box upon which I drew dials and had her write �John Paul�s Radio.� I still have a cassette tape of the four adults interviewing me and encouraging me to sing my entire repertoire, from the alphabet song to �Row, Row, Row Your Boat.� At the end of the tape I say goodnight in Croatian.

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