February 8--about some pigs and other things

[zyzyly]

From 10 years ago:



I don't quite recall what I was thinking about when I took this. Emerging from the primordial muck or something like that maybe. I titled the post "Intelligent Design", so who knows what I was thinking about. I used to put all sorts of cryptic little messages in the alt text back then, but not for this one. A lot of those alt-text messages were a sub-conversation with someone I talked to all the time back then, but don't talk to at all now, other than the occasional Facebook like. I got the idea to separate different stories with a series of asterisks from her, and whenever I would employ it, she would accuse me of stealing her asterisks. And so it goes.
********
The other day I mentioned that I had a dream that triggered a memory about a cement truck. The memory was from when I was a kid, somewhere around 9 or 10. I lived in a relatively small town, surrounded by the large urban expanse of the San Francisco Bay Area. I used to walk home to my babysitter's house after school every day. It was a little less than a mile.

I was walking home from school one afternoon, and a few blocks from the school I came across a fire truck in the street at an intersection between two residential streets. I remember the fire truck clearly, but not any other emergency response vehicles like police cars, although I remember a policeman being there. The firemen were washing down the street with a fire hose. On the other side of the intersection, a cement truck was parked in front of a house. A guy sat on the lawn of the house, sobbing, with his head in his hands. He was alone.

This tableau stays with me after all these years. The fire truck in the street, the firemen hosing the street down, the cement truck parked, the man sitting on the lawn sobbing. And something else. A golden leaf, floating slowly along the water in the gutter, illuminated in the soft afternoon light, carrying something bloody, as it headed toward the storm drain at the corner.

I don't remember any sound at all. I don't hear the man sobbing or the water splashing on the pavement, I just see it. That's the memory, and I see it in my mind every time I see a cement truck.

It was a little girl, probably about my age, who went to the Catholic School that was a bit farther away than our school. She was crossing the street in front of the cement truck, and the driver didn't see her. I don't remember how I found out these particulars, but they are as solid a part of the memory as the vision.

This happened about 50 years ago. I can still see the colors, so vivid. The red of the fire truck, the green grass where the guy sat, the black pavement glistening with water, the beautiful golden leaf floating serenely with its dark red passenger.

I pull up Google and look at the map, find the town, find the intersection. The corner of Via Manzanas and Via Media. Two streets in the middle of a small town called San Lorenzo. Via Manzanas means the way of the apple.

The other day I wrote that I had mentioned something about this memory in a previous LJ entry a while back. I looked, and it was ten years ago, another entry in my photo-a-day for a year (as well as the above pig), which I return to frequently this year. Here is the photo I posted for that day, April 28, 2006:



The caption read: "there was a story that went with this picture, but I am way too tired to tell it tonight." I guess I'm not as tired this evening, or maybe I just needed to get this out of my head.

I wonder what I was doing walking down Via Manzanas that day. There was another street that would have gotten me home faster and more directly. I took the long way around. I suppose a ten-year-old boy has no interest in the shortest distance between two points.

Comments

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

How sad-- but fortunate the memory is not full-detailed.

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

yes--a protective mechanism, I think.

[wantedonvoyage.livejournal.com]

It's a blessing you don't remember the sobbing. The visuals are haunting enough.

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

I am grateful for that.

[annie-r.livejournal.com]

What a sad, strong memory.

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

It is so vivid and intense. One of the strongest of my childhood,

[luscious-purple.livejournal.com]

Something like that happened in my hometown when I was little. A girl just a year or two younger than I was standing with her mother in front of a small cafe. She spotted her Daddy, from whom her mother had recently separated, across the busy street, and she started to run to him. Just then, a huge truck came roaring down the street.

I didn't witness this, but I could read the local newspaper from an early age. I wonder whether I would have ever known that girl had she lived.

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

You never know. The future went in a different direction that day.

[thoughtsbykat.livejournal.com]

A memoery that had to come out of your subconscious. I hope it won't haunt you any longer.

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

I hope not to, although I think it will stay with me forever.

[anita-margarita.livejournal.com]

I can't even imagine the intense pain of the man sobbing, or think about what his life must have been like after that day.

[rejectomorph]

When I was about five years old I had a similar experience, though it wasn't something I happened across. One evening around dusk my mom was attracted by a commotion in the street outside our house. A passerby informed her that a boy had darted in front of a car up the block and had been hit. My mom, who never ignored such an opportunity, decided it would be a good lesson in safety for me if we saw the scene. My grandfather (her dad) was visiting at the time (my dad wasn't home from work yet) and tried to dissuade her, but she insisted.

So we walked about a hundred yards up the block to where it had happened. I remember the solemn crowd standing around in the dark, whispering, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, and most vividly the firemen hosing down the bloodied pavement. I don't remember if we saw the dead kid under a blanket or not, or if we saw Ernie, the driver of the car. He operated a local gas station and was never the same after that, and died just a few years later, though he was probably only in his fifties.

We walked home as my mom lectured me on the dangers of running into the street. But the truth was that I had already been afraid of moving cars (and of trucks whether they were moving or not) for as long as I could remember, so the whole trip had been pretty much pointless. All it succeeded in doing was to give my nightmares new imagery. Years later my mom managed to figure out that her dad had been right and that taking me to the scene of the accident had been an incredibly stupid idea.

After that I wouldn't eat tomato soup for years because it reminded me of the blood I had seen (or imagined seeing, as it was after nightfall and the redness might have been only the reflection of the flashing red lights) being washed from the street.

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

My original middle name was taken from the name of my mother's cousin and best friend who was killed on roller skates, run over by a truck, when they were 12. My mother saw it from her parents' bedroom window. She was grounded and was supposed to be in her own room at the back of the house, and her parents didn't believe her that she had seen it happen. She is still carrying stuff from that, 65 years later.