I have an illusive memory of standing in my crib wailing piteously, my heart fluttering like a chickadee’s, all because I imagined that a hairline crack in the wall that I had been tracing with my finger had suddenly come to life and then mysteriously disappeared.

Beyond that I remember clearly my first relationship with walls when my Dad showed me how to make shadow puppets with nothing but my own hands and fingers. The kitchen wall, opposite the west facing picture window above the sink, was the perfect ‘stage’. In the afternoon, when the sun was framed in the window I became the puppeteer. I created all manner of odd-shaped creatures that flew, skulked and leapt on the whitewashed wall. Later, as the sun got lower in the sky, I became the puppet and I would dance and twirl until I disappeared.

Once, in a violent storm, that wall displayed the silhouettes of flailing branches, backlit by flashes of light that sent me cowering under the kitchen table until the tempest subsided. When I was older and the Maple tree outside the window had grown taller and denser with leaf, my puppet creatures could no longer compete with the pretty dappling patterns that moved and shifted until they disappeared.

Logan Elementary School, where I spent my most formative years, had a brown brick wall that was the outside of the gymnasium. It was big enough for all of us to play against at recess, after some territorial skirmishes that established boundaries. The boys always got the shady part. They would stand a few feet from the wall and throw pennies, or buttons or pebbles at it to see who came closest, or maybe farthest, I’m not sure which but I could never understand the point of it. We girls got a bigger part of the wall and we were much more athletic and creative in our games. We sang, skipped, hopped and competed for endurance. We came prepared with red white and blue rubber balls stuffed in old stockings, which we shared with each other. We played Hello Sir, our backs up against the sun-warmed brick, we would fling the ball against the wall above and below a hopping leg singing:

Hello, Hello, Hello, sir
Meet you at the grocer?
No sir.
Why sir?
Because I have a cold sir.
Where’d you catch the cold sir?
At the North Pole sir.
Whatcha doing there sir?
Catchin’ polar bears sir.
How many did you catch sir?
One sir, two sir, three sir, four sir
Five sir, six sir, seven sir,
Now that’s enough for me sir.

Then one year, the gymnasium was demolished and our wall disappeared.

There was a tall windowless yellow brick wall at the back of my friend Dalia’s apartment building. After school we would meet there in the lane and put on plays of our own making. Even the boys would join in. Un-inhibited by grown-up protocols, we tried out all the characters we imagined we’d grow up to be. I emoted both diva and jilted lover with equal sincerity – oh the glamour and the heartache! That yellow brick wall was not only the backdrop to our theatrical efforts but also to our first, playful, cop-a-feel explorations. Before long, the weirdo from Barclay Street started to hang around and watch us perform. Then one day, when he showed us his penis, we all disappeared.

On Friday nights the neighborhood kids, would congregate at the Wilderton Shopping Center where we would strut our stuff and flirt and play out our teenage dramas. The open plaza had about fifteen stores fronted by a wide covered esplanade where we paraded back and forth. The back of the plaza was intersected by loading docks that jutted out perpendicularly from the building creating a number of convenient dark corners. As the younger kids headed home for their curfews, we older kids hung around until one by one we snuck away to secretly meet our crush of the week at a pre-arranged dock number to practice our first wet kisses. But by closing time at nine o’clock, we all disappeared.

The cinder block walls of my dorm room were twelve feet high and painted murky grey. The one on my side of the room became the background to my first artistic endeavors; experiments in abstract painting, bizarre portraiture and sketches of nude models that I thought were so sophisticated. It was also a venue to vent my social outrage and express my newly formed political convictions. Anti-war, pro-love posters were punctuated with Twitter’s ancestor, the bumper sticker – ‘Shit Happens’ became a mantra for life. But after my freshman year, that wall also disappeared.

Some part of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem has been fertilized with my contribution of the secret wish I had crammed into a crack in The Western Wall. As per bi-annual custom, the Rabbi of said Wall, collects the hundreds of thousands of paper missives to God and buries them on the Mount, for it is forbidden to destroy them. Years later, that secret wish of mine somehow came true in the form of you, my beautiful ginger-haired beau – the love of my life. You were the one who taught me to see things from a slightly skewed perspective. You showed me the many shades of grey that colour our world.  You made me sparkle. Our love became the rock steady foundation upon which we began to build our future together, brick by brick. We worked hard and saved and dreamt about the house we would build and the family we would raise in it. Unbeknownst to me, while I was happily stacking bricks for a wall like a dowry, you my love were working behind me, removing them one by one until they became the wall between us. And then one day you too, disappeared.