Walk Softly Live Gently

Chapter One

Looking Back – a personal telling of one man’s journey

What would I tell you my children about this life that I have lived to this point? Where do I begin? What do I leave out? These are not rhetorical questions. They pose a serious dilemma, for the memories fade with each passing day. The details get a little fuzzier. So forgive me if you discover some inaccuracies where you may have personal recollections and experiences that differ from my own. This, it would seem, is inevitable. But I will attempt, nonetheless to fill in the detail wherever possible. But if not, it may be that the broader stroke will paint a more vivid picture of an otherwise normal life, and yet also have its own distinctive character. You may even be asked to include some of your own recollections of certain events to enhance the telling of this story. It may help others to see how the different perspectives can enhance the community of our collective experience.

I say collective experience because while I may have what we call individual experiences, in fact everything is so intertwined with everything and everyone else that my own individual experience cannot be what is is without that communal influence. And so my story is also your story in a real and poignant way.

While none of us I suspect can remember their own birth and infancy, many of us can recall events from a very early time. My first experience as a child that sticks with me still, happened in our small apartment in a three story, six unit tenement building in Yonkers, New York. It was the only apartment building on Crescent Place at that time and we lived on the first floor in a four room apartment that faced the street. At different times over the years we also lived in the first floor unit in the rear of the building which had five rooms.

In the kitchen of that first apartment I became very familiar with the linoleum floor where I played about most of the time since I was certainly no more than four years old and perhaps as young as three years or less. I was playing there on the floor but not minding my own business as I was fascinated by the noises of numerous adults seated above me around the kitchen table. My mother (Edith Louise Thomas Russo) and step-father (Anthony Russo) had invited friends over for dinner. As they ate and drank and laughed I pondered their frivolity (as much as a toddler can ponder) from my somewhat anonymous perspective almost literally under their feet.

My mother began telling the story of her early pregnancy with me warmly ensconced in her womb. She said that she and some family and friends were eating watermelon that summer of her largeness and someone was spitting watermelon seeds on the ground instead of laboriously picking them out of the red fleshy fruit by hand. Someone apparently thought it would be fun to have a watermelon seed fight and they began to aim their small projectiles at one another in mock battle. My mother said that she was struck in the forehead by one of those seeds and she reflexively threw her hand to her forehead and exclaimed; “Oh my God! My baby is going to be marked”. She then explained that sure enough, when I was finally born into this world there I was with a birth mark on my forehead in the exact same place where she was struck by a single watermelon seed!

I would now have a decidedly unattractive little growth of skin on my left forehead for the next 13 years of my life. And it was not a simple mole. It was a small chunk of skin with little appendages coming from its base which I would occasionally pick at with my fingernails perhaps thinking I could scrape it off like a scab. While I could not pick it off my head I sometimes did cause it to bleed which of course produced a real scab which I then had to pick at some more.

This went on until one wonderful day in 1955 when my mother and I went to the good doctors office where he proceeded to electrically burn off the offending protuberance (no lasers back then) from my forehead never to be seen or felt again. I could now go out in public and not feel like the “Hunchback of Notre Dame”. (Hunchhead?)

Alas, I can hear my younger sister now (perhaps rightly so) noting how our mother never did anything about the large mole on her cheek! I understand now how she would have considered such a thing as horribly disfiguring although when I was younger I actually thought it made her look like a movie star. Nevertheless she would protest (again, rightly so) that she thought I was mothers pet. I used to object to that characterization but must admit she was probably correct and I am very sorry for the pain all of that must have caused her, although I cannot take responsibility for what our mother thought or did with her four children. Parents (myself included) often do the dumbest things to their kids. I still wonder how any of us made it to adulthood at all, and so many of those who did suffered terribly and will we ever really grow up as a species of beings on this planet? We’ll see.
I love you, Cookie.

Yes, I also realize that much of this is editorializing a very simple story but I like to embellish things just a little in hopes of making it more interesting and shall, no doubt, continue to do so in the retelling of these many recollections.
(To be continued)