Writer's Block: In search of lost time
What is your fondest childhood memory? How often does it come to mind?
-- I remember the day we went to the school for an interview for them to meet me. I was only three but my parents felt certain I was ready for kindergarten. In the kindergarten room was a sectioned off play area that included a small pretend stove and fridge, and small kitchen stuff like pots and pans, a whisk, and so on. I was delighted and grabbed a pot and whisk. The teacher (who wound up being my teacher for Kindergarten and grade one and then again in grade four) asked me what I was doing and I said I was making her an omelet.
-- Later on when I went to the school, by the time I was in first or second grade we had lunch in a dining room. Decorum was maintained with an iron fist, and one time I was sent out of the dining room for excessive talking. Everyone was seated at formal dining tables with white tablecloths, and I thought if I wriggled out of the dining room by slithering out on the floor lying on my belly, that perhaps people would not see me.
Regret to say I never lived that down.
-- Another time in Sunday School I had to blow my nose terribly and had no tissues with me. The girl sitting next to me was wearing a Sunday School frock with poofy organza puffed sleeves and big ruffles... so I leaned over and blew my nose on ner shoulder. I did do this.
-- We had a finished semi-basement that had windows up high on the basement floor walls. I was sleeping in a big girl bed then, but my crib was dismantled down there. I used to love to take the crib bar side sections and lay them up against the wall and use them as a ladder to crawl out those windows into the back garden, pretending I was a groundhog. I was SO not allowed to do that for some reason. But it was a favorite game.
-- In general I was afraid of the basement, I believed a furnace monster lived down there.
-- Before I was in school, my mother used to take me to the park every day. The park nearest our house had no playground area with swings etc, but it was still fun to hang out there. One time there was a bat clinging to a tree and a bunch of adults were trying to push it with a stick. They let me get in close to look at him, and he looked sleepy and afraid.
-- Another time, I had to 'go' and it was urgent so my mother suggested I go discreetly in a remote corner of the park. She really regretted this suggestion because after that I ALWAYS wanted to go in the park, just becuase it had been an option that one other time.
At the bottom of the park were steps down into a wild ravine that was like a jungle and I LOVED exploring down there, I wanted to LIVE down there.
-- OK probably one of my favorite bits about childhood was time spent at our summer cottage on a small Ontario lake about 50 miles from the city. It was an easy drive to get out there and once there, we were in another world. Whenever we arrived we would celebrate getting to the cottage by having what my father called a bullrush parade. He would bring some rushes and saturate them with BBQ starter fluid. They would be lit and we would parade around up on the street walking around with our torches.
It would usually be late when we got out to the cottage and we'd probably have been listening to a late night radio play on CBC radio (as far as I know CBC keeps the radio play tradition alive to this very day!) and if the story wasn't finished by the time we drove up to the cottage, we'd sit in the car in the dark with the map light on and thousands of moths crawling on our windshield to listen to the end of the plays... which were usually mysteries.
I remember us being on the edge of our seats listening to an adaptation of 'The Two Bottles of Relish' one summer night. I just googled it:
http://www.heniford.net/4321/index.php?n=Citations-T.TwoBottlesOfRelish-2m2f
At the cottage, my favorite thing to do was run to the water's edge at dawn and watch all the frogs doing their thing. There were green and brown leopard frogs, great big bullfrogs, and others. They fascinated me, I obsessed over those frogs. At night, we would watch fireflies and listen for owls and the plaintive cries of the whippoorwill. I have posted about the cottage before; not too long ago I found a picture of our lake online - and that really got me going about it.
My aunt worked in the costume department of CBC television and I LOVED going to work with her, it was one of my favorite things EVER. There was a great costume storage room that was full of every kind of crazy costume you could imagine, and they would always let me raid the scrap boxes for nifty scraps of glamorous materials 'to make doll clothes from' - I might still have some CBC scraps!
I also totally loved my yearly trip to the CNE. I would save mad money all year round for that yearly trip to the 'Ex' - I loved everything about it, the exhibits, the food, and of course the midway. OK that's all I can think of right now :)
