Life through a bowl of cherries
Aug. 2nd, 2002 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetLast night, as J. and I finished off a bowl of cherries, she happened to mention that one of her earliest free-floating childhood memories concerns eating cherries on ice on a hot summer day. This led to a lengthy, pleasant, and above all procrastinatory discussion of childhood memories, which leads, in turn, to this entry.
Without further adieu, I bring you:
1. I broke my leg at age 4; my version of events involves falling off a rocking chair shaped like a teddy bear, but I can no longer remember if that was what really happened, or if I broke my leg doing something even more foolish or illicit. I was in the hospital for what seems, in my memory, like six weeks, but was probably more like six days, if even that; while there, I watched lots of television, including what I now figure was probably Speed Racer. When I got home from the hospital, there was a toy castle with plastic molded knights to welcome me. It was huge, at least half the size of a real castle, although still not big enough for me to be inside it.
2. In the house in the nearby even smaller town where we lived until shortly before I started Kindergarten, I can remember several occasions where we cowered in the scary basement from still-scarier tornadoes. Once, a tornado destroyed houses within a couple of blocks of us, jumped into the air, and destroyed some houses a few blocks away in the other direction. Sometimes, in my memory, this becomes the two houses on either side of ours, although I know this did not happen.
3. In that house I remember, conversely, sitting in a room upstairs while my dad, shaggy hair and big moustache and all, played folk songs on his guitar, ca. 1973. But so far as I know otherwise, my dad does not play the guitar, or at least has not done so since.
4. This one really doesn't count, as I have no direct memory of the event other than what has been instilled in me from years of family stories, but: while my sister, a year and a half younger than I, was still a babe-in-arms, we were visiting my paternal grandparents. My father, grandfather, and uncle were watching The Game on TV. My mother was taking a shower. Presumably my grandmother was out, perhaps downstairs in the beauty parlor she ran from the basement of her home. My sister was asleep in another room. Everyone assumed that someone else was watching me. Apparently thinking that little sister needed to be all pretty like Mommy, I got into the makeup case and proceeded to paint my sister's eyes shut with nail polish. Somehow, I managed not to cause permanent injury.
5. It's a fall day, I think, and I'm five, either home from Kindergarten in the afternoon, or perhaps I haven't started school yet. My mother tells me not to answer the door if anyone should knock or ring: a bad man who hurts mommies has run away from jail. I am terrified. Later, we hide with Mom in the hallway until someone at the door goes away. But perhaps it is much later, on a different day, and we are just avoiding someone socially.
6. My sister and I are playing "Land of the Lost." For some reason I have assumed the role of teenage Holly from the future in that one episode (and yet I grow up to be straight). I am trying to open a plastic bottle of some sort but it won't budge. I try to open it with my teeth, and discover that I have a loose, and now, in fact, free-range, tooth.
7. Dinosaurs again. I am sitting at the kitchen table at my paternal grandparents' house reading a "Valley of the Dinosaurs" coloring book to my sister. I have everyone's attention, however, as it is the first time I have ever read anything.
8. The boy in the house whose back yard faced ours across an alley was roughly my age and a frequent playmate for many years. In our first conversation he announced that he knew the Bionic Man. And indeed, Steve Austin, and not the one who might leap to the mind's eye of a boy that age nowadays, was always hanging around our neighborhood, but for some reason only my friend could see and hear him. Once, Steve was badly injured in a battle with Bigfoot (or so I am told) and was recuperating on the slide attached to my swingset. I remember being really worried for him. -- That same friend introduced me to many a Bad Word, including "tallywhacker" as a synonym for "pee-pee."
9. Brand new Star Wars action figures, available at first in 1977 and 1978 only at one drug store at the other end of town, had an amazing new plastic smell. From time to time even now that smell triggers memories of exciting new toys.
10. It's a summer day in oh, say, 1980. My friend Shane's dad has, by choice or compulsion, put a box of Girly Magazines out in the trash. We neighborhood boys quickly discover this, and abscond with the goods. We are all certainly old enough to know that naked ladies are supposed to be exciting, even if we do not fully comprehend why.
11. That summer or the next one, I first saw the SCA in action in a demo at a local school festival. I desperately wanted to join (and my family did, within a year or so). I immediately started a swordfighting club in my neighborhood; some days there were as many as ten of us. As The Boy Who Could See Steve Austin had nearly every sort of sports-related equipment known to Midwestern Man as well as the largest backyard, we staged our battles there, dressed in football padding, helmets of great variety, and nasty yellow tabards made from old sheets his mother let us have, swinging away at one another with whiffle ball bats. I wasn't very good at it, however.
12. At the age of 11 or 12, I was often left in charge of The Babysitting Kids while Mom ran to the store or what-have-you. One one occasion, my sister and I took it into our heads to scare them by dressing up in effective but alarming costumes. I put on my medieval beggar's outfit (*1), including hood, and went into the living room to behave in a fairly sinister manner. Small children cried. The oldest of the kids, a seven-year-old girl, was unimpressed. "It's just [Quislibet]," she said. Having foreseen this, I ripped off my hood, under which, by means of a brown magic marker, I had drawn a fake beard and moustache (the real one being some 8 years away). This scared the seven-year-old as well. My mission complete, I washed off the ink and put the costume away before Mom came home. -- Oh, I think we also staged a swordfight with live steel that day. Which was pretty stupid, I suppose.
(*1) The costume had been made for a Secret Mission at Pennsic XI. My future stepfather, a squire to the Prince of the Midrealm, and I were going to go dressed as beggars to the Tuchux camp to try to find out which side they planned to fight on. Rather an exciting prospect for an 11-year-old boy, especially since Rumor Had It that there were nekkid wimmin up on Tuchux Hill. Sadly, the mission never materialized, but I still had the costume for several years after. -- There, a bonus memory.
What random things do you remember?
Without further adieu, I bring you:
Twelve Random Childhood Memories
1. I broke my leg at age 4; my version of events involves falling off a rocking chair shaped like a teddy bear, but I can no longer remember if that was what really happened, or if I broke my leg doing something even more foolish or illicit. I was in the hospital for what seems, in my memory, like six weeks, but was probably more like six days, if even that; while there, I watched lots of television, including what I now figure was probably Speed Racer. When I got home from the hospital, there was a toy castle with plastic molded knights to welcome me. It was huge, at least half the size of a real castle, although still not big enough for me to be inside it.
2. In the house in the nearby even smaller town where we lived until shortly before I started Kindergarten, I can remember several occasions where we cowered in the scary basement from still-scarier tornadoes. Once, a tornado destroyed houses within a couple of blocks of us, jumped into the air, and destroyed some houses a few blocks away in the other direction. Sometimes, in my memory, this becomes the two houses on either side of ours, although I know this did not happen.
3. In that house I remember, conversely, sitting in a room upstairs while my dad, shaggy hair and big moustache and all, played folk songs on his guitar, ca. 1973. But so far as I know otherwise, my dad does not play the guitar, or at least has not done so since.
4. This one really doesn't count, as I have no direct memory of the event other than what has been instilled in me from years of family stories, but: while my sister, a year and a half younger than I, was still a babe-in-arms, we were visiting my paternal grandparents. My father, grandfather, and uncle were watching The Game on TV. My mother was taking a shower. Presumably my grandmother was out, perhaps downstairs in the beauty parlor she ran from the basement of her home. My sister was asleep in another room. Everyone assumed that someone else was watching me. Apparently thinking that little sister needed to be all pretty like Mommy, I got into the makeup case and proceeded to paint my sister's eyes shut with nail polish. Somehow, I managed not to cause permanent injury.
5. It's a fall day, I think, and I'm five, either home from Kindergarten in the afternoon, or perhaps I haven't started school yet. My mother tells me not to answer the door if anyone should knock or ring: a bad man who hurts mommies has run away from jail. I am terrified. Later, we hide with Mom in the hallway until someone at the door goes away. But perhaps it is much later, on a different day, and we are just avoiding someone socially.
6. My sister and I are playing "Land of the Lost." For some reason I have assumed the role of teenage Holly from the future in that one episode (and yet I grow up to be straight). I am trying to open a plastic bottle of some sort but it won't budge. I try to open it with my teeth, and discover that I have a loose, and now, in fact, free-range, tooth.
7. Dinosaurs again. I am sitting at the kitchen table at my paternal grandparents' house reading a "Valley of the Dinosaurs" coloring book to my sister. I have everyone's attention, however, as it is the first time I have ever read anything.
8. The boy in the house whose back yard faced ours across an alley was roughly my age and a frequent playmate for many years. In our first conversation he announced that he knew the Bionic Man. And indeed, Steve Austin, and not the one who might leap to the mind's eye of a boy that age nowadays, was always hanging around our neighborhood, but for some reason only my friend could see and hear him. Once, Steve was badly injured in a battle with Bigfoot (or so I am told) and was recuperating on the slide attached to my swingset. I remember being really worried for him. -- That same friend introduced me to many a Bad Word, including "tallywhacker" as a synonym for "pee-pee."
9. Brand new Star Wars action figures, available at first in 1977 and 1978 only at one drug store at the other end of town, had an amazing new plastic smell. From time to time even now that smell triggers memories of exciting new toys.
10. It's a summer day in oh, say, 1980. My friend Shane's dad has, by choice or compulsion, put a box of Girly Magazines out in the trash. We neighborhood boys quickly discover this, and abscond with the goods. We are all certainly old enough to know that naked ladies are supposed to be exciting, even if we do not fully comprehend why.
11. That summer or the next one, I first saw the SCA in action in a demo at a local school festival. I desperately wanted to join (and my family did, within a year or so). I immediately started a swordfighting club in my neighborhood; some days there were as many as ten of us. As The Boy Who Could See Steve Austin had nearly every sort of sports-related equipment known to Midwestern Man as well as the largest backyard, we staged our battles there, dressed in football padding, helmets of great variety, and nasty yellow tabards made from old sheets his mother let us have, swinging away at one another with whiffle ball bats. I wasn't very good at it, however.
12. At the age of 11 or 12, I was often left in charge of The Babysitting Kids while Mom ran to the store or what-have-you. One one occasion, my sister and I took it into our heads to scare them by dressing up in effective but alarming costumes. I put on my medieval beggar's outfit (*1), including hood, and went into the living room to behave in a fairly sinister manner. Small children cried. The oldest of the kids, a seven-year-old girl, was unimpressed. "It's just [Quislibet]," she said. Having foreseen this, I ripped off my hood, under which, by means of a brown magic marker, I had drawn a fake beard and moustache (the real one being some 8 years away). This scared the seven-year-old as well. My mission complete, I washed off the ink and put the costume away before Mom came home. -- Oh, I think we also staged a swordfight with live steel that day. Which was pretty stupid, I suppose.
(*1) The costume had been made for a Secret Mission at Pennsic XI. My future stepfather, a squire to the Prince of the Midrealm, and I were going to go dressed as beggars to the Tuchux camp to try to find out which side they planned to fight on. Rather an exciting prospect for an 11-year-old boy, especially since Rumor Had It that there were nekkid wimmin up on Tuchux Hill. Sadly, the mission never materialized, but I still had the costume for several years after. -- There, a bonus memory.
What random things do you remember?
