Buses in 1939 were sickening and uncomfortable. But by bus, early in 1939, we went across the United States, New York City to Sonoma, California, New York Okies on their way to a better life. I have earlier memories, like the day my new-born sister came home, when I was just three, and she was like some Renaissance angel with golden hair, in bed beside my mother, who was weeping. But that's a snapshot, the memory of a single moment of childhood astonishment and awe, and while it may be fraught with narrative, as inevitably it had to be, that turning point in a three year old's life, the narrative is hidden in the unseen space beyond the picture's frame. But the bus trip, going to California and being there, that has a sequence of moments, astonishing, frightening, sickening, comforting, disconnected yet flickering on the same film strip of memory, playing for me that first story, which for any life has to be, if not definitive, then defining.
What I know after-the-fact is that my father was either out of work or working on roads for the WPA; that we had bus fare and $10 from my mother's aunt who'd married a farmer, on whose farm we were going to live and my parents were going to work, who turned out to be curmudgeonly or worse; that my father went to the local social services office; that they got a court order forcing aunt and farmer to pay our way back to New York; and that the judge already knew this farmer. For we weren't the first indigents this farmer tried to entrap, though to be fair to him, his view was that my father was a New York gangster. We lasted six months.
I remember feeding the cats, after supper, in darkness lit by a stupendous moon, and being fearful as they leapt for the scraps all around me, meowing and scrawny, leaping like cannibals; and legions of ants crawling up the back stairs, turning right up two or three more and then onto the kitchen floor and up the table leg, and finally onto the painted wooden top, up the side of a tin can, into the goat's milk, drowning-- pungent, sour goat's milk, that I was meant to drink. I remember the fears, the bus on the edge of a precipitous road, night time, great searchlights scouring the darkness below for a car gone off the road; the excitements, mountains sheering down like enormous slides; the sickness, the reeking diesel fumes and rocking, so that even today I can scarcely ride in a bus or a boat without nausea; and the startling newness, the cows in the cool, half-light of the barn being milked into a pail, and the dusty, quiet afternoons in the sunlight that must have been remarkable to a child born to the tenements and the pavements of New York.
But I don't remember the Greyhound Bus Depot, scene of the image on this page. The woman to the right of me, feeding her son, is Jenny, the wife of my father's childhood friend Morris, unseen here behind the camera. In his kitchen, curtained off from the light, I first smelled developer and saw through its dim-lit liquidity the magical re-appearance of life on a piece of paper. He made photographs of events I can't remember but which like the Bus Depot and The Birthday Party are as good as memories, like events about which we can no longer know whether we witnessed them or merely know their stories. For memories and photographs and stories are alike, fluid, unfixed, under continual revision and reinterpretation; so that in the stories of our lives it really doesn't matter how we know something, whether it happened or it didn't, true or not true. I still see Morris, or rather a man I know was Morris, standing in his kitchen darkroom, over some trays, in which I believe I see some prints developing; and maybe I saw it only once, but the memory, unstable as it is, fixed itself in my childhood as a possibility of a way to be, because perhaps I knew even then that it could become part of the story of my own life.
But what about the farm and the bus trip to California, that first story that I remember? How much of what I remember is a matter of intuiting even at three something about my own possibilities of being and becoming? And how much merely the startling newness of experience? Or can the two be separated? Certainly the life of a young child is filled with fears and astonishments. Then this was the first time that I could interpret them, turn them into the story of fear and beauty and quiet and awe, that makes up so much of the life of an artist.