Category: Childhood

I’d meant to do childhood photos and stories on Tuesdays, but once I saw this one, I knew I had to bump my definition of childhood to include my teen years.

This is a photo of a band that was put together solely to play at a science fiction convention. There were actually more members than this, but you get the general idea. Left to right, we have an alien from "V," "Road Warrior"-era Mad Max, Sandahl Bergman’s character from Conan the Barbarian (me! thin! with blonde hair!), and an astronaut. 

Why, yes, this was in the mid-1980s! How did you guess?

So we played our set, which consisted of songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show along with regular rock songs with the lyrics rewritten to be science fiction-y. I have mercifully forgotten the specifics.

We finished up quite late and everyone was tired, particularly my boyfriend, the keyboard player (not shown in the photo). He was driving his mom’s van, and on the way home he fell asleep at the wheel, veered off the road and hit a light pole. The rest of us were following in our own cars, so we saw the whole thing and stopped.

Once the police arrived, they hauled my boyfriend to jail and towed his van. The rest of us dug out all the money we could find and headed to the police station to bail him out.

Keep in mind that we were all in full costume and makeup and it was NOT Halloween.

As I recall, the police officers we encountered acted as if there was nothing out of the ordinary when they saw us. I did wisely leave my sword in the car.

We managed to bail out my boyfriend and get home before it got too dreadfully late. I’m not sure why we didn’t involve anyone’s parents; maybe we did and I just don’t remember.

Anyway, this should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that my geek cred is well established. I even made that costume myself despite the fact that I neither sew nor do leatherwork as a general rule. In fact, I still have the leather gauntlets, later dyed black for use as heavy metal stagewear.

What was your flavor of teen geekdom?

Dee at Voices in My Mind had a post today about a box turtle that her husband brought home for her son to see. It brought back all kinds of memories for me about the turtles we used to play with when I was growing up.

We lived in a rural area of Kansas City on a 13-acre plot, and there was plenty of wildlife wandering through our yard, pasture and woods at any given time. Every year, we’d catch box turtles, play with them for a while, then let them go. One year, at what must have been a parent’s suggestion, we decided to name one of the turtles and paint the name on its shell with white latex house paint.

That first turtle’s name was Pat, and we let it go after we got tired of feeding it produce from the kitchen and watching it pee when we picked it up (just like a toad, which were also fun to play with).

The next year, turtle season came along and there was Pat – except that the lettering on its shell had weathered so that the name said "Pot." Excited by our success, we started naming and marking other turtles. There was one called Zot (which was probably inspired by the cartoon "B.C.") and a small one we called Tot. I don’t remember any others, but there were probably more.

Occasionally a huge, washtub-sized snapping turtle would wander from one of the nearby stock ponds up to the corral or even the yard. When that happened, my dad would grab it by the tail and drag it back to the woods or pond. He said that they would snap viciously the whole time, cleanly severing saplings as big around as his thumb. Those stories made me equally scared and fascinated.

What wild creatures did you encounter as a child? Do you still see them around?

10/5/07 – I couldn’t resist adding this photo, which came from this site:

As you can see from the photo, I’ve always been a big fan of Christmas presents.

This year, I ended up getting gifts from several friends for whom I hadn’t bought anything. When I was younger, I probably would have agonized about it, apologized, made up excuses, etc. Instead, I decided that the best course was to thank the givers effusively, follow up with written thank-you notes, and plan to make it up to them on their birthdays. That sounds reasonable, don’t you think?

Are you ready for some more holiday cheer? Here are a couple of online sources:

• Cecil and Britches: No Santa Today – A short film about a sock monkey and a donkey doing their best to spread holiday joy.
• Find Out Your Grinch Name – Average Jane = Miserlytroll Crustyham

Enjoy your Thursday!

I’m guessing this is from the early seventies, judging by the apparent age of my sister and my ’70s-tastic pants. I have quite the collection of photos with Santa, all taken against this cardboard castle backdrop. Santa’s throne is pretty fancy, though, don’t you think?

Sadly, the mall where we used to go every year to shyly mutter our wish lists to the Big Man was recently razed and replaced with a gigantic Wal-mart.

Well, I found it. With a level of goofiness that only a kid can muster, I decided one year that red jumper + Santa hat = elf.

My favorite thing about this photo is the crude paper ornaments adorning the tree – oh, and the bookcase made of cinder blocks and boards that was de rigeur in every middle class household of the 1970s. The Christmas tree would shed needles onto the books and we’d keep finding them well into the following year.

Incidentally, this is the least scary this photo has ever been because the magic of Photoshop allowed me to fix the demonic red eyes that I had in this and every other Christmas photo I found.

Tomorrow: A visit to Santa in his cardboard castle.

Here’s a photo of me in full-on spoiled brat mode.  My parents had arranged for me to ride around the ring at a rodeo on my pony, Twilight.  Clearly, the Rodeo Queen did not appreciate sharing her photo op with her little sister.

Twilight was my second pony – the first was a tiny, red Shetland named Twirlsy (can you tell I named her myself?).  Twirlsy once bucked me off in our pasture and then stepped on me as she walked away, but she was so small that it didn’t really hurt.

I think the event in the photo marked the beginning and end of my rodeo career.  I’m
still comfortable riding a horse, but I was never expert at it.  After I outgrew Twilight, my parents gave me the option of getting a horse or getting to go on a school trip to Washington D.C.  I chose the trip.

It was probably the right choice.  I’ll never pass up a chance to go horseback riding, but I doubt I’d ever put in the effort to own and care for my own horse again.

By the way, the photo above is also part of the Vintage Kids as Cowpokes pool on Flickr.  I ran across the group a few months back via a link on another blog and I’d been meaning to find this photo and add it ever since.  Click and see other wee cowboys and cowgirls over the past century or so.

Don’t be jealous, but the Tooth Fairy and I are *this* close.  I still have this note that she left under my pillow (click to enlarge, or as Mac would say, "embiggen"):

I don’t know how old I was when I wrote this letter to the Tooth Fairy asking her to draw a picture of herself, but it’s been folded up in my baby book ever since.  Why is the paper all crinkly?  Well, it’s because it’s written on a Kleenex.

I though it was very accommodating of the Tooth Fairy to take the time to draw the picture (with wand!) and still leave me a quarter or whatever the going rate for teeth was at the time.  She couldn’t resist hassling me about my dental hygiene, but I suppose you can’t blame her.

Have you ever run across an old photo that made you realize, "Wow, my family was really weird."

The photo above illustrates that sort of thing nicely.  It's our "swimming pool" from about 1979.  Let me explain what's happening here.  We had a large, round, rock-rimmed flower bed off to one side of our front yard.  It was always terraced downward toward the middle.  I remember my mother trying to grow strawberries in it, but the turtles would always get in and eat them all.

One year, my dad decided to dig it out still further.  He draped an enormous, pink tarp over the whole thing, filled it with water and made it into a pool.  It was probably two-and-a-half feet deep in the middle – perhaps a little deeper.  My folks would fill it with the garden hose (visible in the lower right, you'll notice) and splash some Clorox into it to discourage algae growth.  When it got slimy and horrible anyway, my dad would scrub it out with a long-handled scrub brush and then refill it.

I think the slide is my favorite part of this picture.  It was just an old playground slide, perched precariously on the edge of the "pool."  These days, I don't think any parent in the world would allow his or her child to play on such a thing.

Naturally, we loved our pool and spent hours "swimming" in it during the summer.

When I was growing up, my dad always used to say, "When we get rich, we'll get a swimming pool."

It took years and years for me to realize that the "when" in that equation wasn't a certainty.  For the longest time, I figured we were just biding our time until we got rich and the swimming pool crew came out to start digging.

Today AdRants mentioned a new commercial for Clorox that explores how laundry has changed over the years, and it made me think of visiting my great-aunt when I was growing up.

Aunt Edith had the most fascinating washing machine I’d ever seen.  It had an open agitator drum for washing the clothes and washtub of rinse water right next to it, separated by a wringer.  She would take the wet clothes from the wash water and run them through the wringer into the rinse water.  Once they’d been rinsed to her satisfaction, she’d run them through the wringer again and put them in a basket to be taken outside and hung on the line.  She did have a gas dryer, but she only used it in the wintertime and for towels that would have been too rough and scratchy if hung outside.

I loved to watch her do laundry when I visited.  She would let me feed clothes into the wringer – carefully!  The risk of pinching my fingers in the rollers made it that much more exciting.  It was also an interesting novelty to hang clothes on the line.  I’m sure I made more trips outside to check the laundry for dryness than was strictly necessary.

It never occurred to me to wonder why she still used such an old-fashioned laundry setup.  It made perfect sense:  why change something that works just fine?  "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it."

Many of my close relatives, including my great-aunt, my grandmother and even my dad, lived through the Great Depression and took its lessons to heart for the rest of their lives.  Every time I darn one of my old socks, turn off extra lights in the next room, or make a stewing hen stretch into three meals, their influence comes through…and I appreciate it.

On Monday, Heather Armstrong of Dooce posted some of her second grade homework.  It reminded me that thanks to doting relatives who hoarded all evidence of my burgeoning creativity, I still have a copy of the very first story I ever wrote.  Without further ado:

The Olive and the Pickle
by Jane, Age 9

Once upon a time there was an olive and a pickle.  The olive danced around and played, but the pickle slept all the time.  The pickle was the olive’s next door neighbor, but the pickle didn’t like the olive because he made too much noise.  The olive didn’t like the pickle because he slept all the time.

But one day a whistle sound came from the door.  A present was there in the box.  There were two jars in it; one with olive juice and the other with pickle juice.  On the card it said "Aunt Olive, Uncle Ollie, Aunt Patsy Pickle and Uncle Patrick Pickle."  On the box was a note.  It said, "Please wake up pickle and give him the jar."  The jars are marked.

Olive said, "Wow.  If I could only find a way to make Pickle wake up, I would do anything."  As he got to Pickle’s house, he knocked at the door and then Pickle came to the door.  Olive told Pickle what his aunt and uncle gave him.  Pickle said, "But Olive, you left the radio on."  So Olive rushed out and once again went to turn off the radio.  When he got back to Pickle’s house, he said, "Do you want your swimming pool?"  "Yes," he said, "if you go to the store and take my money and buy a water bed."

So he went to Hot Dog Street, up Pancake Street, two blocks and down Apple Avenue.  He cashed a check there and went back to buy the water bed.  To his great disappointment, a big fat lady grapefruit bought the last one.  Olive said, "I will not tell Pickle.  I will go to the sporting goods store.  I’ll try the water bed there.  Won’t Pickle be surprised.  I’ll buy it."

When he got back, Pickle fell asleep on his water bed, while Olive played ball, swam, got out, dried himself and picked little cakes off the bushes and ate until he was full.  Now it is you see Olive and Pickle are friends because Olive is not so noisy and Pickle is not sleeping all the time.  That is the end of my story.

*****************
Notes:  If this seems exceptionally well punctuated, it’s because someone (probably my mother or grandmother) typed it up for me at the time.  Apparently she let me determine my own paragraph breaks, though.

What’s with the crazy water bed stuff?  At the time, I thought that those inflatable pool rafts were called water beds. 

Cakes growing on bushes?  Huh?  Read as many Oz books as I did when I was a kid and some of it would rub off on you, too.