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Touche' "those bit*hes deserved it". I was the big brother and no-body messed with my younger brother or sister (Other than me..jk). I remember some Fat kid pushing my little brother around in Jr HS. I cornered him behind a 7-11, took his bike from him and bent it into a pretzel. He was crying his eyes out and called me a bully..WTF
When I was in grade school if we walked the length of town down Main St. to school, sometimes one of the bigger bullies would grab a smaller kid. They used to want to rub your face in the snow bank where the dogs had pissed. I would scream and flail and kick. One day I caught this guy with a kick right between the legs. He suddenly became very short, and his eyes got as big as saucers. I just ran away. I told my mother after school...very proud that I had escaped. She, on the other hand, after listening to my graphic description got a far better picture of what had happened than I had. When my father came home there was an urgent appeal to "explain to him." My father laughed. No explanation was forthcoming.
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Then there was Pam, my first crush. Wonder where she is now?
Mine was Mrs. Anderson, my kindergarten teacher. I gave her an "emerald" ring...a 12 cent deal from G.G. Murphy five and ten cent store. It was our "engagement ring." My mother was called upon again, though not by me. Once more she seemed at a total loss and was unable to explain why a five-year-old could not be engaged to his kindergarten teacher. In all fairness to my mother, I do remember that Mrs. Anderson was not as thrilled as I had expected.
Not everyone had a simple, uncomplicated, happy childhood so no thanks, I'll take my 53 chronological years and more any day.
My inner child is much happier in my adult years. She was suppressed and never had much of a chance to surface when she needed to as a real child. Now she's wiser, happier, and infinitely more creative. Did I mention a tad on the crazy side?
I thought this was going to be about actually remembering. I can remember fragments of my childhood from age 2, and a fairly complete record from age 3. That world is long gone. It only exists in my memory and a few black and white snapshots.
I remember childhood with a great deal of warmth and pleasure, though it is the environment of my childhood that I gives me these feelings more than recollections of particular people or events. I grew up in a small town that was very prosperous, but was set in the midst of farming country. A creek that flowed through the countryside had been dammed in the village, and that gave it the appearance of being a large river in the center of town. Woods grew along its banks almost into Main Street, and wild meadows and woods were not more than five minutes from any neighbourhood. There was a tiny playground near the school, but only a very few small children went to it, most kids just played outside in the streets or the woods and fields, and our "playground" was a very old graveyard that ran behind our street.
The outdoors was everything...swimming, fishing, collecting bouquets of wild flowers for our mothers (the lack of enthusiasm for the lovely goldenrod seemed a bit ungrateful), there were all kinds of birds to be sighted, and small wild animals and bugs. Bugs did everything. They hopped out of your hand higher than all hell, they stung, they stunk, they rolled up, and the fuzzy-wuzzies tickled, caterpillars turned into beautiful butterflies if hatched in a jar...or very, very weird moths. Parents threw handfuls of seeds out onto the snow at breakfast time in the winter, and the backyard would become a buffet for incredible numbers of squawking and cheeping birds while we watched from the table.
From my neighbourhood we walked to down a street, across a gorgeous bridge that was an Italian renaissance copy and then along a path by the creek, with weeping willow trees that the flickers liked to perch in, and the path ended up near the primary school. In the winter the school principal would appeal to parents in my part of the village to make their kids walk to school down Main Street. The reason was that the Cinder Path that we took was not a street, just an unplowable creekside path...and grade school boys having two and three feet of snow to walk through - and roll around in, and throw at each other, and stomp a "trail" in - were about a half hour late for school after every snow storm. The creek froze in the winter, and we ice skated on it in the center of town, and at the end of our street there were steep slopes down to the creek and we used to toboggan and sled on them all winter.
And in the Spring we would start going up into the valley south of our county into the hill country to visit my grandmother, who lived in a village with gas lit street lights, and up into the hills where my aunt and her family had a farm with really thick woods and a swampy marsh...which meant all new animals, flowers and plants (like skunk cabbage), etc. And cows and playing in the hay mow. And stinky "cow pies" and "horse balls."
It was the Forties, sometimes we played "cowboys," but mostly we played "war" in the old cemetery. "War" was fun, and The War was everything to grownup, although it meant almost nothing to us kids...but it gave us the game we called "war." After a game of war in the cemetery, we would go to the pile where the caretakers threw all the old funeral wreathes and bouquets, and we would pull them apart to get the freshest flowers and take them home to our mothers. Like goldenrod, these gifts were mysteriously not appreciated. Ironically, I suppose after a game of "war" they were an appropriately grim offering. But we didn't know. Flowers were flowers.
It was a dark time due to a certain amount of proverty and dysfunction but, there were some good memories. Being outside all day playing, going fishing, visiting older relatives and listening to their stories...that part was good. Parents working all the time and being left in the care of careless caregivers was hard...
I know my parents tried. They were hardworking, honest, intelligient people who were emotionally distant.
I have what I believe are clear memories from about age 4 on. I'd describe my childhood til age 10 or 11 as generally happy and relatively carefree. I was born in the mid 50s and spent the 60s living in a new suburban development which was surrounded by a pretty rustic ruralness. That combination gave me lots of kids to play with and a fantastic natural playground to enjoy.
I had crushes on teachers, including one nun who set clear boundaries but left my feelings intact, something I'm grateful for. My first girl crush was a relative of a friend of mine who spent the summer with that family when I was 8. She was 11-12, and so my love for her was ill fated, but I really didn't mind. She too was decent about things, especially considering how young she was. My male friends, not so much.
Somewhere around age 10 we stopped playing and started hanging out. We still played lots of sports, but no more of the imaginative games we had played prior. I remember asking a couple of guys if they had fun anymore, meaning the kind of lost in the moment fun so characteristic of a few years earlier, and they looked at me like I had grown a 3rd eye.
I still tend to be introspective, and I still get the 3rd eye response most of the time.
My first "crush" was on Annette Funicello, one of the original Mousketeers. She was an older woman (by 4 years) and a television star. Therefore she was quite exotic... Annette Funicello - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I stopped a couple of bullies with carefully-aimed punches to the nose. I had to use two on one of them.
Generally speaking, my childhood was good. My adolescence, on the other hand, wasn't.
-- Nighteyes
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. Wonder where she is now?
My inner child is much happier in my adult years. She was suppressed and never had much of a chance to surface when she needed to as a real child. Now she's wiser, happier, and infinitely more creative.
Did I mention a tad on the crazy side?
