The Trio of Clay Faces

They say most people people cant remember much before four or five but I have a handful of memories from when I am much younger. All my memories are different, but many have a theme of an intense feeling they created, either good or bad. Most are when I was by myself and are funny little things. Sleeping on top of a giant blue bear my mother had won for me at a carnival. Playing in a laundry basket humming the Flintstones theme song to myself and tossing myself against the side to simulate when Barney had that big rack of ribs tip over his car. I remember my frustration of not being able to get the laundry basket to flop flat, instead it rolled back and forth. There is one of me dancing and wiggling in front of the fridge pointing to the giant olive jar on top of it, that Dad would take down and give me a handful to eat after I'd place each one on a tiny toddler finger. I have a vague memory of seeing my sister being born and being confused and overwhelmed. Others are less pleasant, waking up screaming from a nightmare, with my ears ringing and bleeding from infection (I had chronic ear infections as a child and would have had tubes put in my ears if born a few year slater). There are several of my parents fights.

One memory is after my parents divorced when I must have been three or four and is one of the only memories I have of my maternal grandfather. Mom had moved to Huntington and we were living in a tiny apartment. My grandfather came to visit us and I remember he played guitar which I liked very much. I remember sitting in the brightly lite kitchen making clay faces with him using my mothers garlic press to make hair for them. I remember that I made three, painting their eyes blue like my own.

I have always had this memory and knew that one had gone with Grandpa Bill, one to Dad, and the last Mom had kept. I knew the one that Mom had very well. I saw it many times over the years. It originally had buns on either side of its head but one had broken off. After Mom died I made sure to snag it and I have always kept it on a little shelf on display explaining to people it represented one of my earliest memories. I knew the one my Grandfather had been lost for good. If he had even kept it for very long, my mother and him were estranged for most of my life and he died a couple years before Mom did. If he did still have it, it must have been tossed by whoever went through his things, it having no meaning to anyone at that point but me. The last head I knew Dad still had, he told me so each time he saw the one in my possession when he visited me and had promised to show me it, but had never got around to and had no memory of what it looked like.

I found it in my box, the ones dedicated to each kid that we had search so long for after Dad died. I was thrilled and also tickled. The head Dad had ended up was unmistakeably one of the trio. It's hair though was much more impressive than the bun bearing one I was so familiar with. I had made quite a pile of clay hair and it was piled up dramatically like a french up-do. Looking at them now they remind me of something Tim Burton would have come up with and makes me think that might be why I so love his work. Either way, this is one of the times I was thrilled Dad hung on to everything he did. Even though he was not present for the memory itself, and the third of this trio is forever gone, it meant so much to me to have this, to breath life into a toddler memory of a happy afternoon.