“If Magritte had painted my childhood . . .”
In Composed: A Memoir, Rosanne Cash writes, “If Magritte had painted my childhood, it would be a chaos of floating snakes, white oxfords, dead Chihuahuas, and pink hair rollers. ”
Here is what my Magritte childhood looks like:
If Magritte had painted my childhood, the sky would be Florida blue and Carolina gray. I would slip through a rubber tube and sink to the deep end of a pool, rescued by my pregnant mother. I would stumble through a split-level house in a perennially diet-morphing body. Big dogs would roam the yards. My mother’s new blue bra would hover over a cherry hedge as I described it to a neighbor pressing me for details. I would sit on an overturned bucket in the cab of a steel delivery truck on a Saturday with my father. A tractor would crush a midnight orange-grove joyrider. A wedding ring would be buried in new sod. A pig’s head would overlook its barbecue. Shocking pink walls would match a nail-polish-remover-ruined bedspread. In the corners, shadows of a gun and a to-be-removed tree. My volcanic moods would erupt with the moon or books read or music played from records and tapes, 8-track and cassette. I would drive away in a fast Camaro, windows rolled down, never-smoked cigarettes hidden in my purse.
If Magritte had painted your childhood, what would it look like?
Photo: Inspired by Magritte, from Istockphoto
Comments are closed