#8. Pale Blue Walls

My earliest interest in cutting-edge science was mainly in evolutionary biology. As a high schooler, I watched National Geographic TV specials about archaeologist Louis Leakey, who unearthed the remains of early hominids in Africa. I read Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis and Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape. My interests “evolved” into the social sciences, but I still read books like Carl Sagan’s Dragons of Eden during college breaks, and discovered Richard Dawkins’ amazing The Selfish Gene in grad school.

And Holy Sweet Son of Darwin, could these guys write!

Years later, Carl Sagan would publish Pale Blue Dot about our place in the universe and the fragility of planet Earth. The title was inspired by a 1990 photo taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it streaked away from home into interstellar space. By then, Earth appeared as a mere speck in the void to the probe’s camera. Sagan wrote:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

When I started elementary school in 1962, science and technology weren’t just concepts. They were happening all around. The polio vaccine was released just a few years earlier. The first integrated circuits appeared. Polaroid’s instant peel-apart color prints came to market. John Glenn became the first person to orbit Earth in a space capsule. The first live satellite broadcasts from across the Atlantic showed up on our TV. I was six years old, the younger of two boys in a working-class home, and the only family member gobsmacked by current events.

Before first grade and the launch of the Gemini manned space program, my home on the south side of Framingham, Massachusetts, was my whole world. It was my pale blue dot, the universe encompassing everything and everyone in my orbit. There’s not much of a record of that place and time. No 8-millimeter family movies, no journals, not even any childhood friends from the hood that I can locate on social media. The memories are great, but I wish there were more tangible reminders.

My parents weren’t picture-takers, but I’ve found a handful of good ones in a box of snapshots I had stowed away for years. This old photo shows the “Markovsky boys,” taken by my mom circa 1962. That’s Dad with his hands on my shoulders, and my older brother Dave sitting on the steps. Behind us is the cement porch, kitchen windows, and back door to the small apartment where I lived most of my first nine years.

I took the second photo when I was back in town for my mom’s funeral in 2017. I returned again more recently. I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Until today, I’d never looked very carefully at the background objects in the older photo. I hadn’t realized there were five kid-vehicles in the picture. My brother and I each had a two-wheeled “scooter.” They’re down on the ground leaning up against the porch. We’d probably scooted around that very day.

My brother’s bike is in the left foreground. To its left is the back half of my two-wheeler. My tricycle is up on the porch. That means this snapshot probably captured that brief transitional period when I graduated from trike to bike. That graduation has to be in the Top Five Awesome Accomplishments of my life. It sounds silly now, but riding a two-wheeler around the neighborhood gave me a deep, primal sense of liberation. It was thrilling!

One or two baseball gloves sit on the left front of the porch. We had a full diamond in the backyard of our six-unit apartment house, and enough interested neighborhood kids to have ball games anytime that daylight, weather, and parents allowed. Typically, first base was a square someone etched in the dirt with his heel. Second base was a brick. Third base was one of three barrels used to burn garbage. Neighbors in our apartment house would fill them to the brim with trash and set them ablaze. Sometimes they’d even burn during games, which didn’t seem at all weird at the time—until I sustained second-degree burns over my entire right hand when I pushed off a burning barrel rounding third on an inside-the-park homer.

Our entire equipment inventory consisted of a rubber baseball and two old bats—one of them too light and the other too heavy. Some kids had gloves. Mine had belonged to my Dad. My brother’s was “found,” where he would never say. We all had Red Sox caps. I don’t think we ever broke a back window on the house, but we came close enough at times to have warnings yelled at us regularly. We ignored them.  

Back on the porch, our barbecue grill is visible over my Dad’s right shoulder, and a bag of charcoal is above my brother’s head. What a treat it was when, once every few weeks in the warmer weather, Dad cooked out and served us various combinations of burgers, dogs, chicken, corn, and potatoes.

I have some very early memories in that apartment. This is where I grew from helpless infancy into a gregarious 3rd-grader, before we moved to our own little ranch-style house in a development on the north side of town. I remember a lot, even from the time I was still in a crib. Ridiculous details of the apartment’s interior were committed to memory through sheer repetition: its pale blue and green pastel walls, peeling paint, antiquated appliances, deteriorating linoleum floors in the kitchen and bathroom, splintery wood floors everywhere else, and sturdy woodwork. I also vividly remember the neighborhood and all of the people who were part of my life at that time.

Over the years, I fantasized about going back into that apartment to see how well it matched up with my memories. One year on a road trip, I did.

I knocked on the door, and a woman named Maria opened it a crack. She’d been renting the place for more than a decade. I offered some reassurance that I lived there as a child and just wanted to see what it looked like now. Incredibly, she let me in. What follows is excerpted from Chapter 18 of my book, Everyday Extraordinary.  

Maria animatedly talks about changes in the neighborhood and the town since she’s lived here. Nearly everything she says is positive. I’m still feeling overwhelmed to be standing here. Nothing has changed in this kitchen. It’s the same cupboards and the same double-basin sink where my mom bathed me as an infant. The range and refrigerator are in the same places. Her outdated kitchen table and chairs might as well have been ours—the scene of the crime where my mom served up her infamous mashed squash, a most memorable and awful side dish.

Maria walks me through the hallway to the living room. Her TV is where ours used to be, against the interior wall by the fireplace.

“It doesn’t work,” she says, pointing at the pristine hearth.

“It never did,” I inform her.

Her couch is across the room, its back to the wall under the front windows, just like ours was. That was the hunting blind from which my brother and I, kneeling with our elbows atop the backrest, surveilled the neighborhood.

We walk through my parents’ bedroom, then through the door connecting to the bedroom my brother and I shared. There was only one bed in there. It was on my side, in the same corner of the room where I dreamt of monsters and baseball games.

The loop complete, we’re back into the kitchen. The thought of snapping phone pictures feels invasive, so I’m consciously trying to burn every visual detail into my brain—the cupboard hardware, the baseboards, the paint colors, the flooring. Memories are flowing—images of mundane family scenes, of moving about these very rooms so long ago. My voice is quavering and I’m close to tears. I focus on the uneven drywall above the stove where the non-working exhaust fan used to be.

When it’s time to say goodbye, I thank Maria effusively for opening her door to me. She hugs me.

This place. I went from being unconscious to conscious here. It incubated my curiosity. It fed me a snack after school. This is the place I’ll likely never see again after I walk out that door.

I walk out that door.

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