A pen and a piece of cake

I might have already bummed out a few people with my memories from school in my previous post. So I’m thinking, maybe writing about things I don’t actually remember has less of an emotional impact. At least not an obvious one (insert ad for antidepressants).

There isn’t much I got told about my early childhood. All I know is that I was a difficult baby – always crying, fussy, and not eating. My downstairs neighbor once came over to complain about my hysterical crying and found my mom having a nervous breakdown.

The crying might have had something to do with the fact that my mother, a true Romanian  woman, obsessed with preventing me from catching colds, always made sure I was bundled up and toasty. I was slowly roasting in what felt like swaddle hell, even on hot summer days. I’d be happy that such memories are erased from my brain, but my body remembers everything.

In winter, since heating was not always a given in our buildings – with it being centralized you depended on the city turning it on- a lot of us had to endure the freezing cold in our apartments, at the mercy of the supplier’s directives on when and for how many hours we’d get some heat in our radiators. Blame the communists. Given this chilling situation, my mom made sure I had like 3 tuques and 5 sweaters on, and that I was sleeping close to an electric heater. Roasting is like a requirement for survival. No wonder a lot of babies don’t even feel like eating anymore. 

I didn’t like food or eating, and my only favorite thing to eat when starving was bread and butter (or mostly margarine, because butter was not always available). We didn’t have junk food, cereal, pizza pockets, waffles and chicken nuggets. As far as I remember, the frozen foods were non-existent. We also didn’t have toasters, microwave ovens and other appliances you’d normally find in a home nowadays. Our only option for toasting stale bread was adding a metal plate to the gas stove, directly over the flame. Stale bread was not to be wasted, but as “croutons” were not a thing in our poor-ass cuisine, we often ended up dipping the bread in linden tea or milk and eating it like that. Follow me for more recipes. 

Of course, as kids, we also loved candy, even though the variety was lacking, the classic peppermint or orange hard candies would do the trick. That is, if it wasn’t Christmas, when the holiday candy was available – if you were lucky enough to find some in stores. These candies were specially meant to be used as decoration in the Christmas trees, they had silver paper wrappers with twisted bow tie ends, where you would tie a thread loop to hang them in the tree. The candy itself had a grainy sugar texture, resembling a hard fudge (or maybe cement, depending on the expiry date).

One of the stories my mom keeps telling is how when I was about 1 year old and barely walking, I managed to grab on to some shiny decoration (or maybe candy?) in the christmas tree and pulled it away – and of course the tree came with it. She walked in the living room to find me awkwardly silent under the tree, in the middle of the room. Maybe I was finally feeling the relief of not being swaddled to death so I didn’t cry. Or maybe I was just happy I got the shiny thing. My insidious destructive nature is also obvious through another story from the same age: as I was beginning to walk, I stepped on and killed our only pet, Chip the yellow canary. He was free to fly inside, and sometimes would hop around on the floor. One day, he had the misfortune of walking in my path and my little stubby feet equipped with booties (made for walking!) stepped right over the poor bird. Luckily I don’t remember the episode, but the story lived on, as my first steps required animal sacrifice for the gods. 

When I was not a bird killer, I just liked to play with my stuffies like Judy the monkey and Lily the cone-head green doll. Toys were not very diverse, really ugly, bland and kinda useless. Maybe having a pet was the best option – if your kids didn’t kill it.  From what I know, because the communists wanted people to procreate and populate the land (abortion and contraception were declared illegal through a famous decree), there was a sudden baby boom and the national toys manufacturing couldn’t keep up. Fortunately there wasn’t a real shortage, but buying a nice toy before Christmas was quite a feat. And as my birthday fell before Christmas, I felt like I didn’t have the best toys compared to other kids (my dolls were like one piece molded plastic or stuffed fabric, they didn’t have real body parts… Third world problems.)

The first birthday is a special celebration for Romanians. The tradition calls for a specific ritual, where the birthday kid is presented with a tray of various symbolic objects and they have to pick out a couple or more. The first objects the kid touches or picks from the tray are said to symbolize their future. For example, if you pick a book, you will probably love reading, be smart, or work with books. Such a tray would usually have objects like: money, candy, pen and pencils, paint brushes, makeup, book, photo camera, map or globe, calculator, and whatever else the godparents might add. The story goes, when I was presented with the tray to pick my life-defining items, I chose the pen and a piece of cake. Oh, mais quelle surprise. I may like writing, and cake too! 

There’s also this other tradition where the godparents have to cut a strand of the baby’s hair on the first birthday. This usually ends in tears, and probably with an unexplained, life-long hate of haircuts.This is symbolically the first haircut the baby gets in their life, so the moment is marked by tying red thread around the hair strand and storing it in a box.  I don’t remember having my hair preserved for posterity, not even sure if they cut my hair, though I don’t like going to the hairdresser, so there’s that. 

In the end, with all the insufficiencies and shortages, we didn’t know any better. We were prevented from knowing what a real toy or Christmas looked like beyond our borders, and as kids we really lived in sweet oblivion. We liked every ugly toy, every expired candy, and every piece of hair we’d randomly find in a drawer. We make your own happiness with the little we’ve got, as our potential as humans is so much bigger than what they can control. All we need is our imagination and curiosity, if we just stop and pull on that shiny thing to see what it does. Maybe we get overwhelmed with the burden of what we find, but in the end it only matters that we found something. Not sure how much imagination or insanity it takes to ignore the shitty world around you, but when everything else fails, there’s always cake.