Biographical, Captain Kangaroo, longreads, Memory

The Captain and River Teeth

David James Duncan calls autobiographical images “river teeth”. Those little snatches of memories that lack substantial form, the fullness of full memory. Just the remnants that the rivers of time have left after their washing. My earliest “river tooth” happened when I was around 2 years old. They say that one cannot remember events of that age. They say that it must have been the memory of a conversation heard at a later age. But, I don’t believe that. The memory is real. Very brief. Just an unstable shard that has snagged itself to the edges and embedded itself there. Not a bad memory, but a happy moment that followed a bad event. I was in a bed in a hospital room and my brother was in the bed with me. We were watching Captain Kangaroo on the TV set. I remember other people coming into the room, but not who they were. And that is it. The whole of the memory. The story behind the memory I didn’t learn till I was much older. Our family had gotten carbon monoxide poisoning from the fireplace in our house. I was told that when the emergency people got there, I was pronounced dead, as they could detect no heartbeat and I wasn’t breathing. They were ready to just write me off until my dad intervened and told them “they” would need medical assistance if they didn’t try. So, I guess I am here today through a combined effort of a warrior father and enough of his spirit in me that I wasn’t allowing the world to be done with me so soon. Learning this when I got older allowed me to make the connection to my first memory. Its not much of a memory, as I said, just a tiny shard, indistinct and fuzzy except for the image of the Captain on the small black and white set that was in the room. Though many years passed and I outgrew Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans and most of my thinking of the show faded into memory, it imprinted a special slot in my being. I still remember hearing of Bob Keesham’s passing some years ago. I felt a hollowness and tears fell from my eyes. A sense of sadness I have never felt over the passing of any celebrity before. As endearing as the show was, I have to admit that I believe the true cause of the sadness was it was the passing from this world of the person that gave me my first memory. Its odd, the connections our brains make at various times in our lives. The things that remain, the things that seem to be discarded. Sometimes we hang onto the pains, the sorrows, the tragedies. And sometimes, if we are lucky, we find the moment of laughter, of togetherness, of winning out against death itself and that is the memory that buries its hooks in the recesses. I think that is the true warrior spirit that is birthed at such times. For, what it teaches is not the glory of the battle or the winning of the battle, but the peace and laughter that exist just on the other side of the battle, if one can just hold on long enough to make it to that side. There have been many in my life that have been on that other side when I have survived, many that have held a hand to help me across. And maybe, just maybe, I have moved always forward all these years on the trust that they will be there. And as silly as it may seem to many, I have the Captain as the first smiling face to greet me on the other side of darkness. SephiPiderWitch 04/20/2012
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Ponderings
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