Riverside

I am in my mother’s arms. I am in my mother’s arms and she is running. I am in my mother’s arms and she is running, beneath pillars of stone, arcing over us like the ribs of some great beast. I am in my mother’s arms and we are running for a door, a rectangle of light in the gloom, a door that seems further and further away the longer we run, and I can feel a twisting, turning hand in my stomach and I don’t think I can make it.

She whispers as she runs. She tells me it will be OK. She tells me to hold on. She tells me we are almost there. I don’t think I will make it, but she tells me we are close and she would not lie. And so I hold on.

We burst through the door and into blinding sunlight. My mother holds me close to the ground, and I know we have made it, I know it’s ok. I know I have not let her down. I know it’s ok. I throw up on the grey stone steps. She whispers to me, my mother. She whispers that she is proud of me, that I did good, that I made it. She whispers that it will be all right, that I will be alright. She whispers these things and I know them to be true. She would not lie. And in that moment I am prouder of myself than I have ever been since and likely ever will be. And I know that I will always remember it. And I always do.

This is my earliest and most vivid memory: Running through the massive (in my child’s eyes) halls of Riverside Church, sick as a dog and ready to vomit my guts out, but holding it in until we reach the door. At least I think it is a memory; god knows how skewed and warped it has become after years of re-remembering. But my mom doesn’t remember it, so who else could have told me?

In retrospect I can imagine the relief my mom felt. She was spared the awkward and all around unpleasant experience of holding a puke spewing child like an unruly fire hose while running through the halls of a church. In the world of parenting, getting me out of there in time must have been akin to the feeling of shooting a winner three pointer in a championship game. She certainly deserved to be MVP for that performance, and if we’re to see that analogy through to its bitter end, I guess I could be credited with the assist.

I went to school at Riverside Church in Manhattan for pre-k and kindergarten, twice for the latter. I don’t remember much of it, but my mom tells me that she kept me back for a year because my maturity level was a bit low for a first grader. I don’t really know what that means, and for the sake of my ego I’ve never really asked, suffice it to say, I got to spend another year doing whatever it is kindergarteners do. Eating chalk and the like, I would imagine.

Adjacent to Riverside Park, the school was my first after arriving to the city with my mother after my parent’s divorce. I don’t remember much of anything from that period of my life, except for my gastric adventure on the steps of the place, but I do remember little trips we would take into the park. Like Central Park, at its best Riverside Park was like a refuge from the city, and to a child like me, it was another world. I would spend my time there with the other kids pulling up grass until we found the kind that smelled like onions. I’d like to think I never tried eating those wild chives, but I was known to have maturity issues.

Times like those spent in nature, and other times, both earlier and later, contributed to a rift in my mind that I still cannot reconcile. Not that I desire to. I know my history from the telling of others. I know where I lived and with who. And I know that I lived in Harlem at the time, while my mother managed her late father’s liquor store.

But even now, in my mind I was a child in fields and by rivers. I was a child under trees and stars and sky. I played in the ruins of ancient civilizations, in places lost to time. And the friends I made were ghosts of the world I knew; phantoms of other realms. I know the hows and whys of it all now. How those memories were the machinations of a child’s eye and a child’s mind imposed on my present self.

But I prefer to think that I was a child between worlds. That the world I knew then exists somewhere still, even now. That in some unknown place, some unknown time, a million miles from here and a million years from now, the child I was still plays in sunset fields and dappled rivers; still wanders the halls of ancient castles and climbs on pillars of time-washed stone.

And in that somewhere, I hope he always will.