Nostalgia: Pancakes, Paraffin, and Stars
If I stretch my memory back to the earliest moments, a film rolls in my head. It’s in colour. It must have been late summer, 1962, Telstar by the Tornados played regularly on the radio. I had spent the whole summer to autumn season on the Isle of Bute on Scotland’s west coast. We had a simple wooden hut with no water or electricity.
Each day I walked to the communal well with an older person with containers to collect water. Cows watched with wary eyes; the calves edging forward, curious, and timid.
At dusk, we lit paraffin lamps. My father read to us — Heidi, Tales from 1001 Nights, Chinese Folk Tales — his voice a thread that carried us into other worlds. We ate freshly baked pancakes with homemade jam and washed down with sweet stout in small glasses.
The lamp hissed softly, its light flickering sleep into our eyes. When it finally dimmed, so did we.
Lying in bed, I watched stars pour through the window; and I wondered if the Chinese farmer boys or the Bedouin shepherd boys or the milkmaids in the Swiss mountains were seeing and feeling the same feeling that I felt of a wise creator who placed all these stars in the sky.