About five years ago I started writing a memoir. I kept at it for a little while, writing about 1,000 words a day for a few weeks. I hadn’t yet been to therapy and there were many things I didn’t really understand about my life, but I still find the unfinished memoir to be a fascinating look into my own past. I’ve decided to post it in installments here, with only a few redactions. You can find the other sections by clicking the Memoir category.
/ / /
8.
My grandparents lived in an apartment building on the corner of Main Street and Housatonic Street in Lenox. The building was known as the Hagyard Building, because Hagyard’s Pharmacy was on the first floor. My grandparents had the second floor of the building, and my great-uncle Jack and his second wife lived on the third floor. (As did a solitary elderly woman who lived in the back room of the third floor until they discovered her dead one day.)
If my life has a Mecca, the Hagyard Building is it. This yellow-brick monument to our family’s past was the central point of gatherings, celebrations, dinners, and stories. My cousin-hero Todd and I ran through its rooms playing Incredible Hulk. I’d put my Dallas Cowboys pajama top (Todd’s favorite team) over my shoulders, and the transformation into the Hulk consisted of me yanking the pajama top off my shoulders and throwing it to the floor like Lou Ferrigno.
One day I was standing in my granparents’ bedroom. My grandmother was in there, wearing a purple silk nightgown with white polka dots. I loved to rub the material between my fingers. She eventually gave it to me, and my “silky†was born. That nightgown stayed with me until my fingers transformed it into a frayed fragment measuring two square inches.
Down the corridor from the bedroom was the den, back in the day when people still had dens. The den was the room with the couch you could relax on, and the TV set. One night, my great-uncle’s apartment upstairs flooded. My grandfather climbed onto a chair and removed one of the panels in the drop ceiling to investigate the pipes above, and a gush of water drenched him. In my memory, he’s wearing tan pajamas.
The focal point of the house was the kitchen. White with yellow highlights. A long rectangular table took up most of the kitchen, and the counter, sink and stove ran along one of the long walls. On the opposite wall were cabinets, and in these cabinets there was a cheese slicer. The slicer consisted of a small cutting board with a hinged wire blade on one end. You placed the cheese on the board, lifted the cutter, and voila! – Velveeta slices at your fingertips. And it was Velveeta, believe me. The cheese of the future. In fact, the two foods I remember most from my grandparents’ apartment are Velveeta and Ring Dings. Not at the exact same time, but certainly in the same day. And it was somewhere around this time that I developed my lifelong passion for Freihoffer’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. (Original Recipe, thank you very much.)
I go back to Lenox and look at the Hagyard Buiding every chance I get. The pharmacy is long gone, that space occupied now by a real estate office to sell the outrageously priced homes that are now the norm in Lenox. I no longer know anyone who lives in the building. I’d met the trio of elderly women who moved into my grandparents’ apartment in the 80’s, but they’re long gone – maybe from life itself. In spite of all that, though, just being in the presence of the building gives me a sense of calm, coupled with a painful yet pleasurable longing for a time gone by, for a childhood not to be regained, for roots in a town.
Comments