Not until last month, when I caught an early screening of Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October. I’ve only recently given any thought to the color of my memories. I have plenty of black-and-white photos of those days, of course, the good times and the hard times, but the memories they trigger are always in soft, slightly blurry color. The point is, such memories are almost always grainy and a bit bleached out, but very much in color, like the 16mm films my dad occasionally took of my brothers and me, especially during the holidays before he and my mom divorced when I was 5-years-old. At that time in our lives, she could not afford new clothes for herself, but she somehow found the money to buy me that book, which I remember more today for the cheery banana-yellow of that duck on the cover, and the comfort of my mother’s gift, than for the story itself.Ī few years later, I remember when my brothers and I attempted to explore the drainage tunnel down by the creek, and a shirtless, loudly hollering neighbor with a missing arm (blown off by a bazooka in WWII, the other kids said) suddenly appeared to chase us away, the colors of his bright blue eyes - and the faded green grass skirt of the dancing girl tattoo on his one good arm - are as seared into my brain as the terror the man effectively conveyed that afternoon. Later, propped up in bed after a nightmarishly excruciating visit to the dentist, I remember the splendid yellow of the illustrated duck on the cover of Marjorie Flack’s “The Story About Ping,” the book my mom bought for me that afternoon, so I’d have a fresh distraction from the pain.
The torrent of red blood in that particular memory is in garish (but strangely exhilarating) technicolor.
There’s the day I crashed my scooter and landed on my face, bashing out my two-front teeth on the sidewalk. That’s how it is for nearly every recollection I have before the age of 12. The intoxicating avocado green of the thick shag carpet my brothers and I would lie on to play Go Fish after dinner.
The glistening paper-bag brown of the turkey as Grandma pulled it from the oven. A rainbow of glittering lights on the Christmas tree in the corner. When I try to recall Thanksgiving, 1968, for example, a holiday I remember taking place at my grandmother’s mobile home in Rancho Cucamonga, the images that flash through my brain are in a kind of bright but indistinct color, some details popping out as vividly as certain others remain vague and shadowy. When I look back on my childhood and try to visualize various moments of my early life in Southern California - at first in Ontario, in the Inland Empire, and then later in Downey, in Los Angeles County - the memories I see in my mind do not appear in black and white.