Take me there

I was about 8, on a family vacation up to Washington state from CA. At about Mt. Shasta we stayed the night in a smallish motel. KFC meal in a box and quarter-for-a-vibrate vibratin beds.

At that moment, I was satisfied.

Why I remember this....I dunno.

I was about 7 or 8. Spent twenty cents on the latest issue of Superman, treked with my buddies over to "Lickety Good" Deli and ordered a ham and macaroni soup. Read the entire comic cover to cover with a glass of Coca Cola and full A/C while it was 34ºC outside. Not a word exchanged among buddies. We just knew how good we had it.

Great thread.

Back of the house my father had just built; late August, air dry and heavy with goldenrod and hay chaff and sawdust. I am 7. Me and my 2 sisters & brother are lying in the stirred-up dirt that will be the yard, panting like dogs in the sunlight and too lazy to move. My mom arrives with three of those 5-gallon buckets of neopolitan ice cream: and she lets us eat it with our dirt-caked hands, as the dishes are still packed and the grownups are too tired and satisfied to care.

We threw fistfuls of the vanilla at each other in the shadow of the house, and probably ate as much sawdust as sweet. It was fabulous.

It wasn't a well-kempt childhood.

Some of my nicer ones...

A clear blue sky day in spring at primary school. The school had 16 acres of grounds, and there were trees that blossomed with a really nice sweet smell in the air.

When at primary school we used to have a day where we went to the beach (where we now live) on a steam train, and at some point on the trip they'd bring out boxes of apples, and for some reason it was always the nicest apple I'd ever tasted.

A swimming hole called "Coleman's Pool" in the Patea river, and I can still recall that crazy thump-thump of my heart evoked by first fumbling adolescent attempts at making out on the bushy banks of that river.

Wow...I honestly couldn't pick just one memory.

Every summer my parents and I would pack up for a 2 week vacation and drive all over the country. One year we'd go west, one year southwest, one year east. A couple of years when I was a little older, we toured several Civil War battlefields. I've been to every state except Alaska and Hawaii.

I have so many wonderful memories of those trips, it's impossible to separate just one or two.

Fourteen years old, flying into Heathrow, watching Britain rise up to meet me. I'd been dreaming of the place since reading LotR at age ten. It was just me, traveling to meet the US Track & Field team, so I didn't feel quite so embarassed when I cried.

I don't remember much in the way of fun in my early years. I know I had some. Life is never all bad. Mostly I think it was just dumb stuff and not worth remembering.

I hitch-hiked a lot. I remember so many times wishing I had a car. Now I almost wish for those care free days. One spring when I was fifteen I got a twitch in my drawers to go to western New York to visit a friend. It was the only time I ever used a suitcase. Usually I traveled light. I was always looking for an edge and I thought using a sign might help me get rides faster. The suitcase made a great place to tack the sign. I could stand with my thumb out while the case sat at my feet announcing to any would-be ride that I was heading to NEW YORK.

I started in western Pennsylvania so it wasn't much of a trip. I had to change highways so I put the city for the interchange on one side of the sign, Erie, PA, and my final destination, Niagara Falls, NY, on the other.

Some friends dropped me on the interstate just out of town to help me get started. I had the sign under my arm until I was along side the road and I bent over to affix it to that old cardboard suitcase with my thumbtacks. While I was fighting the wind and trying to get the poster board to lay flat, a car pulled over. I picked up my sign and my case and ran to the door. "Where you going," the driver asked, alone in the car. I don't recall what I said, but I probably gave him a long winded explanation of how I was going here to get to there to connect to that road, et cetera, but he told me to hop in. It was a small car and I struggled to get the case into the back.

He drove me about halfway to Erie. When we came to his exit he dropped me. We said our thanks and good lucks and I again leaned over my case to tack on the sign when a van pulled over; purple if I recall correctly, filled with about five long haired types that I just fit real well with. Before we had gotten up to speed, one lit a joint and handed it to me. Not to offend my host I took a long deep drag and passed it on. When the munchies took over they pulled out some sandwiches and, not having had much of a lunch and since it was getting dark, I was hungry, and grateful. After sandwiches we listened to music in the stoned quiet of the van until they dropped me in Buffalo.

I was just getting my senses back. About the time I got the sign stuck to the case, but before I could set it up, a car pulled over. He took me all the way to Niagara Falls and dropped me at the friend's door. I beat the average drive time for the trip by half an hour. I never did get to use that sign I made and the suitcase went in the trash before I left for home. It was more than I wanted to deal with. I never hitched with one again.

It was an interesting way to travel. I had the pleasure of a lot of interesting people while hitch-hiking. The nearest thing to trouble I ever encountered was once getting picked up by a Jesus freak that spent the trip trying to convert me from my heathen ways. It didn't work. I'm still a heathen.

I miss sticking out my thumb anytime I want. But I'd be afraid to do it now. Things have changed so much. If anyone asked me today, I'd recommend the bus.

Azraelsbane said:

Fourteen years old, flying into Heathrow, watching Britain rise up to meet me. I'd been dreaming of the place since reading LotR at age ten. It was just me, traveling to meet the US Track & Field team, so I didn't feel quite so embarassed when I cried.

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The first day I arrived in the US. Saw my first snow in Seattle, just like in the picture books. Practically took my breath away. A perfect beginning of my coming-of-age story in my adoptive country... There's something you will never ever forget, and that first sight of picture-perfect snow was it for me.

maestrowork said:

The first day I arrived in the US. Saw my first snow in Seattle, just like in the picture books. Practically took my breath away. A perfect beginning of my coming-of-age story in my adoptive country... There's something you will never ever forget, and that first site of picture-perfect snow was it for me.

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My first walk through Sarajevo. I'd never been outside the States, and I was used to straight lines, steel, and asphalt in a city. The roofs of houses there have these rippling little rose-colored ceramic tiles on them, and outside the city the streets are cobblestones so old they're polished smooth. Everyone wore such bright colors. I remember walking up a hill under this huge stone arch older than America, and marvelling that places where humans lived could have such history. I can still smell that peculiar combination of pollen and car exhaust in the air when I think of that arch, and hear the muezzin giving the call to prayer from speakers on the mosques. It's a very vivid memory.

I grew up in a small rural town. The city limit sign read 4400 and beyond it, we were surrounded by fields on all sides and back roads that led to smaller towns, villages at best. And we had the Mississippi River at the edge of town, and the bridge that led to Fulton County.
We knew the town and the backroads without looking -- a natural instinct of high schoolers to automatically know the roads that would be home to the adventures of our reckless youth.
Some time in a given Saturday night, we would meet up with our best guy friends. My fiery redheaded best friend, the too skinny blonde (with the town's judge for a stepdad), the punk, and me. I was wearing boy's Levi's jeans. They were more comfortable than the high-waisted 80's jeans the girls wore. So boy jeans with their low loose waist, snug thighs, faded to nearly white, with the faint diagonals of the blue they used to be peeking out like denim's memory, coupled with a t-shirt of some concert I'd gone to was my weekend get-up.
And after the boys had dropped off their dates, and the girls had finished the possible occasional and rare dates, we'd all meet on some random back road, walk through a field, through a long-forgotten cemetary, through woods, to a lake or to the river's edge. We'd play music on the car stereo, light a fire, dance. We'd lay flat on our backs and look at amazing stars you just can't get in town. We'd pass a bottle, smoke cigarettes someone nabbed from their mom or dad. Sing. Drive for a while, road lit by headlights and moonlight alone, car lit by dashboard lights and the red cherries of burning cigs.
Steve had a horrible voice. He'd bark at the top of his lungs, "Turn the page!" to a full moon through the open sunroof. Bobby would thump his chest while he laughed so hard he coughed. Squirrel sat quiet, taking it all in--the one who watched. At first I wondered why he was there; he wasn't like them. Oh, but he was. He watched, laughed, experienced. He was the one who remembered it all, saved it in his memory, let it touch him. He recognized it as something he'd want to recall later. he was the one who was willing to admit he'd be grateful for it later. He knew it would be nostalgia before the years had past.
Someone would end up making out with someone else, but it never changed anything between us, and it always stayed a secret. It was friends, having fun, and damn-it-all fun sometimes included secrets. It was just friends. No couples. And it was a blast. With no couples, we were drama-less. Only fun. No fights, no break-ups to split us up. It was high school low maintenance heaven.
Sometimes I had a curfew (which wasn't all the time) that called me home. I'd go to my room, lay in bed and watch out the window. At the edge of the field, the flashing headlights signaled me back out; climbing as quietly as I could through my bedroom window. All for another ride, another song, another beer. Another kiss.
And I almost never got caught.

Meeting my best friend in grade six, the new girl from Vancouver. We had the same classes and became joined at the hip. I remember: working in the school store and the secret passageways, that we're not ladies, the locker that she could squeeze into and to only be found by the principal, where's da gum?, jumpsie, the teachers who only liked sweet and quiet girls and the hairy ones and the dishevelled-hair ones, the first sleepover with glow-in-the-dark crayons, secret messages on the walls and ceiling, laughing so hard that our faces and stomachs were sore the next day.

There're too many memories to count with new ones every day. We've been best friends for over ten years now and I can't imagine it ever ending ^^

One thing that I will remember, interspersed through these others, is that the city has torn down the middle school were we met, good ol' Prince of Wales. We were only there for two years... but it was where the good times happened, the times we call The Golden Years. They've torn it down and it feels like they've tried to erase everything, even that car alarm that went off every day on the walk home.

But I've got a brick, and I've got her.

Grandma's house, around 4 p.m. any Sunday: the mingling smells of baked ravioli or ziti, sweet sausage and pork cooked for the gravy; the sounds of noisy cousins and football on the TV. A dining room wall to wall in mahogany paneling, a door leading from the dining room to the pantry, a stained glass window, a glass serving table with liquor and wine glasses that I never saw used. The taste of grandma's homemade gravy, washed down with grape juice in small glasses that were reserved for the kids.

My other grandmother's house in the country; Sunday barbecues, the best juicy hamburgers with pickles and ketchup. Sitting under her huge oak tree in the front yard. She had those cup holders that you find in antique stores now that you just spiked into the ground and the top part held your cup. Bu the BEST part: Drinking her iced tea out of those old aluminum cups - also antique finds now. I can still taste the cool aluminum mingled with the sweet tea on my tongue.

Going to my grandmother's house in Kleinmond, red tide in the lagoon and walking along the beach front with my dad. We found a skate with its eyes pecked out and my dad chased me with the damn thing. I'm still terrified of skates.

Older but not wiser. I spent my teenage years in Jo'burg, hitching in to town to go clubbing. Walking through Hillbrow and just keeping the ABSA sign in sight, because it was a couple of blocks from Alcatraz. How I was never raped and murdered while stumbling around Jo'burg at night in my gothique gutter glamour, drunk on cheap cider, I'll never know.

Our first bag of Sour Cream and Onion Lays.

Ripped open the bag and crammed our hands in searching for the biggest chip. Examined it, smelled it and licked all the salty goodness off.

Sat back and ate the whole bag with out pause or drink, licking our fingers and picking our teeth in end.


No one can eat just one, was born.

I wrote about the blood door. Apart from some embellishments, it's a true story.

I was 7 when I french-kissed Teresa Robichaud. She was so cute with her squirrel smile and her rat's nest hair. Not so cute, you say? But, yes...yes. She could climb my pear tree as fast as me...touch the wind above the branches and laugh. Because we were threatening the sky, telling it to fuck itself because we were there...in its realm. We were sky...climbers taking pickaxes and gettin' up in the world above my mere backyard. And in the breeze that moved the leaves and caressed the pears it was born. The kiss that would remember me forever. The kiss of lips and then, deeper, the tongues. Talking in tongues. We thought that was kissing, not speaking in Hell's great oratory voice...we are legion...kissing in the wind above the trees and screaming at the sky. "You're not all that!" I remember Teresa when the autumn wind lifts the branches and we are privy to the darker colour of the leave bottoms...the trees change tone and moan with the wind and I look up...way up...and see Teresa leaning there, on the tallest branch...waiting to receive my probing tongue again. But that was over 30 years ago.

Visiting my grandmother's house was going home for me. The crickity crick stairs leading to a lopsided 2nd story. The library, with books carrying the breath of decay...mouldering and beautiful and leather...and me reading them in the old, old chair that was covered in the hide of an unknown animal...soft fur, but stinky with dust. Don't jump in the chair, or you'll sneeze! I remember my summer cat giving birth to nine. How all hell broke loose after the first month or so. How twice kittens died...having curled into the warmth of a car engine. The MRRRREOEWWW screech before their deaths would shake the house with knowing. And the ringer washer...pushing and pulling. My crazy third uncle or some such thing who made bird cages out of plastic tomato crates. Beauties to behold...but only in a curiosity sort of way. He's dead now...but he played War beautifully...always we had the same card, always we had War...always he won it with an Ace. And my grandmother....her hands are God. She is dead now...but God can go to dust in hands and still be. She made potatoes and onions in cast iron pan...filling her falling down mansion with the aroma of life. And filled it too, with pepper...pungent. Cats would gather at her feet purring her to nirvana. Just the two of us for the entire summer. We would just do. Just do. My favourite time in life. And the library...did I mention the library. I think of it still. Thousands of books...

She had the brownest eyes--so brown they were black and she seemed to know everything. Her voice took on a limp of frailty as she aged, and her back curved more and more each year. They tell me she used to look like me, in shape, size and the eyes.
I have her hands too. A mess of lines a fortuneteller once said was a sign of an old soul. She and I must have shared one.
Her house smelled like fried chicken. Her jelly dish was ceramic and shaped like a bunch of grapes with it's purple bulges and perfect green stem top. She made peanut butter cookies, and in that little voice would say, "good lord, child, save some for the oven."
She'd walk me through her house each visit, showing me pictures, telling me stories. SHe believed in ghosts and had convinced all of her grandchildren that one lived in their little one bedroom home. Green eyes, they called him. some version of sunday sports blasted from the tv, while the men and boys crammed into the small living room to watch a game. The women, the sisters, would cook together in the tiny kitchen, five of them like the works inside a clock, gears moving around each other in a synchronized sunday lunch dance. Each of them on patrol for small hands sneaking in for bite of something that wasn't quite ready yet.
I don't know how we all fit. My grandmother, fragile matriarch in her tiny one bedroom home, her seven children and their spouses and all of their children gathered in the 3 small rooms for dinner. No idea where we sat our plates, if we ate in shifts.
A cloud of smoke hung above us, blue and hazy. Laughter chimed. Dishes were washed, and I always got the feeling as I left, that she was never grateful for the quiet that would follow. That Sunday nights, for the widow, had to be the quietest, lonelinest moments of her life.
For that reason, I never wanted to leave.

Fourteen years old. August. My best friend and I, on our backs on his trampoline in his back yard. I was wearing my big tie-dye t-shirt, he was scruffy with a streak of dirt from his temple to his chin. The sun was relentless, and gnats attacked me from every angle. Ocasionally our fingers would brush, and we'd hold hands. Then we'd let go and still be together.

It's hard to pick a favorite childhood memory, so I was just trying to remember one of my FIRST ones.

When I was a very little girl I had this big clown doll named Emmett Kelly. He was probably as big as me. He wore a black and white striped suit, had big clown feet, curly orange hair and bright paint on his face. And for a while he had a big red nose. But being a small child who likes to put things in her mouth, I had decided it would be a good idea to suck all the red coloring off his nose. No, I didn't get lead poisoning or anything like that. But poor Emmett ended up with a plain old flesh-colored nose.

Anyways, apparently he got tossed around a bit, too, and his head tugged on, and eventually his head fell off. Well, I was devastated. My favorite big cloth doll headless. I cried. My favorite companion had lost his head. My mother decided that Emmett would have to go to the doll hospital. So one day he went off in the car with my parents or disappeared anyway. He was gone for a long, long time.

When Christmas morning came that year, I rushed into the living room to see what Santa had brought. And oh my goodness! Sitting there in a little chair, with his head up and his nose once again painted bright red, dressed in a brand new multi-colored outfit--was Emmett Kelly!

I screamed, smiled, and hugged him tight.

Imagine, Sicily, 1933...

rhymegirl said:

It's hard to pick a favorite childhood memory, so I was just trying to remember one of my FIRST ones.

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My earliest memory is somewhere under two years old. I was looking out the storm door at our car. It was all smashed up in front. It seems to be something of a pacing for my life, given the twenty-some crashes I've endured.

Sorry...fun stuff, fun stuff...maybe later.