Lucky Star

In the kitchen, dark outside.  The walls were a kind of green, drop leaf table pushed against the wall.  We lived in the upstairs apartment of a two family home, where I’d lived my whole life.  I shared a bedroom with my brother, right behind the kitchen.  Sesame Street comforter on the bed.  The memories are murky, but I remember the kitchen being pretty empty.  We probably already had packed things away for the move to New York, where we had bought a new house. 

There was a little radio on the shelf over the kitchen table.  There I stood, looking out the windows into the yard below where we had dug out and filled in an ice skating rink the year before.  And to the street beyond, errant headlights coming and going.  

I swayed in time with the music, Lucky Star by Madonna.  I can still hear the music coming out of the little radio, sounding tinny with the volume turned way down. I committed the lyrics to memory, a trick of mine; once I hear a song a single time I will remember the lyrics forever.  Madonna was just starting to get popular, and her music would flow into the background of many memories of my childhood.  But this one, this is the first.  The first moment I can recall being attached to a song.  Lucky Star. 

Soon after this, we packed our things into a moving truck and made the drive to New York from Massachusetts, where I’d lived my whole life and where our extended family lived.  I was in kindergarten, we moved after Christmas break.  I’d just turned five.  My mother had her friends help us move.  She often had groups of friends around, sleeping over and coming by for parties.  I don’t remember my father there.  He may have already gone away by then, the reason for our move to New York.  Much of this time is a mystery to me, I have only fragments that I put together over time to piece together the puzzle.  But I think he was already gone then and we were moving to New York in a new house to start a new life.  

My mother was so young still, she would have been 23 then.  She put me in the car with her friends for the drive.  She took my younger brother in the car with her.  I remember the thrill of being handed a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola to hold onto.  I felt so grown up.  

We lived in New York for six years.  The things that happened during that time, I now realize, cemented me into the person I would become. I’ve spent a lifetime since trying to escape it, forget it, paint over it and re-author it.  I’m only now making sense of it.