My earliest memory of traveling abroad occurred when I was four years old. During the summer of 1958, my family took a trip to Europe which included a few days in Paris, the City of Lights. Being a young child, I was naïve with respect to the nuances and textures of French culture so I could be forgiven for thinking that ‘French’ fries originated in France (they actually began in nearby Belgium). Or that ‘French’ toast was not a French invention, but can be traced back to a 2,000 year old Roman cookbook.   It would be many years before I learned about the French revolution, haute cuisine, and the horrific history of the guillotine — all of which contributed in their own ways to the arc of Western history.

After an afternoon of sightseeing in Paris, our family searched for a streetcar to return to our hotel. The Parisian street cars at that time had a set of mechanical double doors in the middle of the carriage that opened up at street level. When the ‘French’ double doors swung open the traveler would bound up a couple of steps to the seating area of the cabin. I remember that a row of seats directly faced the steps so that seated passengers could look down and see new passengers boarding.

That afternoon, a streetcar pulls up curbside and the double doors swing open. Being a high-spirited young lad, I eagerly start to run up the steps to board. But hold on — it wasn’t the right street car! Upon landing on the first step, I feel my father’s hand grab my arm and yank me back to the curb. The grab threw me off balance so as my feet landed on the pavement the double doors slammed shut on my neck. At that moment, with my head stuck in the double doors I looked up and saw an older woman with her mouth open wide in a silent scream of horror. She looked like the figure in Munch’s The Scream about to have had a heart attack. Of course, the double doors automatically retracted so that I am able to recount this early travel experience with my head and wits fully intact. To this day, I wonder if her outsized, horrified reaction to my virtual decapitation might relate to the French collective memory of the guillotine (about 17,000 French citizens died by guillotine during the Reign of Terror). I do count my streetcar experience as the first time I had any meaningful interaction with someone I met during my travels.

 Come to think of it, I have another early memory of my family trip to France. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, air travel was a big deal. Families dressed in their Sunday best because traveling on an airplane was a special occasion to be celebrated; it marked the air traveler as having a status and cachet that you wouldn’t ordinarily find on a train or bus. My status was confirmed by the tie and blazer I was wearing atop of some rather dapper knickers. At the time, airlines catered to the needs of a status-conscious, growing middle-class by offering fine dining menus that exceed even today’s business class options. Free alcoholic beverages were served and you could even smoke in the plane’s cabin (ugh).

On our flight to France, my family was seated together in one row and being a high-spirited young lad, I became bored almost immediately. This was nothing to do because this was the pre-internet, pre-flat screen, and pre-smart phone age of flying. Plus, being four years of age, reading for hours was out of the question. So what is a high-spirited young lad to do on a long, transatlantic fight? Hmmmm.

Several hours into the flight the cabin lights dimmed and it was time to sleep. I was relegated to the cabin floor beneath the seats. As I rolled around restlessly on the floor, I spied a pair of shiny black women’s pumps beneath the seat in front of me. It was my first encounter with high heels and I was entranced. They had such a provocative shape for a shoe and how do you even walk in those things without falling over anyway?

I took one of the pumps in my hands and started to caress it, feeling its inner lining, and touching the tip of the heel. I was getting weirdly excited, but couldn’t fathom the emotions that welled up inside me. Things were getting strange. What happened next part eludes me and I cannot fully explain what transpired while caressing the pump.  This is what I remember: there was a pat of butter on the cabin floor beneath the seat in front of me.  It must have fallen unnoticed during the evening’s dinner service. Somehow, by morning that pat of butter ended up getting smeared all over the inner lining of the woman’s pumps. What a mess. I told you things would get strange.

The next morning, after breakfast service we started to deboard the plane. I could hear the woman in front of us complaining about the condition of her pumps and wondering how butter could end up slathering the insides of a shoe. As we were leaving the plane, I think she shot me a “j’accuse” look.

     For many years, I have tried to make sense of this utterly irrational action on my part. True, I was only four at the time of the butter-in-shoe incident, but what could have possessed my puerile brain to abuse a woman’s shoes with a churned dairy product? I don’t have an answer, but a Freudian would account for my actions as my unconscious libido operating at the phallic stage of psychosexual development. In this telling, the butter-in-shoe incident would represent my first remembered erotic experience.  This is because one Freudian interpretation of shoes is that they are vaginal symbols and manifestations of a womb environment.

The same Freudian notion might explain why my virtual decapitation was the only other vivid memory I can recall from this trip to France.  According to Freud, decapitation symbolically represents the repressed castration anxiety that is experienced by all men and boys.  In this view, nothing can be more traumatic than the idea of castration for a young boy during the phallic stage of his psychosexuality. 

You can choose to believe in these Freudian accounts of psychosexual development, repressed symbols and their impact on my childhood memories.  Or not.  But here’s the thing…I still find women’s pumps highly stimulating.

*****

I‘m a native New Yorker currently living in Florida.  I guess that makes me a "Florida Man."   After earning my doctorate in psychology, I taught at the University of Central Florida for 36 years.  During that time, I published numerous scholarly articles human learning and memory and taught several classes involving Freudian theory.  Recently, I retired as Professor Emeritus with a lot of time on my hands.  I have taken this as an opportunity to write for pleasure.

Contact Alvin

(Unless you type the author's name
in the subject line of the message
we won't know where to send it.)