Category: Childhood

I found this “name 5 things about your childhood” meme on Kiwifruit, so I thought I’d take the easy way out today and just discuss the same topics.

1. Games:  We played a lot of games when I was a child, but one of the most memorable for me was BINGO.  My grandmother had a BINGO set at her house and when we came to visit, she would be the BINGO caller and my sister and I would be the players.  She would wrap a collection of little prizes from around her house for us to choose and open each time we won.  After all these years, I still remember getting a tiny bottle of pikake perfume, which was probably a memento from a cruise my grandparents had taken.

2. Television:  Like most children of the 1970s, I watched way too much TV.  I clearly remember Sesame Street and the Electric Company.  Later, I know I never missed an episode of The
Muppet Show.  We watched Wonder Woman, the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, Charlie’s Angels (which my parents felt was a little inappropriate for us, but we got to watch it because they watched it), Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley (my first cat was named Boo Boo Kitty), and slightly older shows in reruns like Gilligan’s Island and the Beverly Hillbillies.  There are many, many more I could list, but you get the idea:  I was steeped in television as a kid.

3. Fashion:  Could there have been a worse fashion era for a kid than the 70s?  I distinctly remember an outfit that can only be described as a "girl’s leisure suit" in pale yellow with appliqued fabric flowers all over it.  I also had an icky, pale blue polyester pantsuit with a vest.  I remember wearing a floor length "granny dress" made of pink and white gingham for my school photo one year.  Kids today don’t know how lucky they are!

4. Toys:  I had an extensive Barbie collection, but it was always a treat to visit my great-aunt and get to play with the Barbies that had belonged to her kids a generation earlier.  She had a Barbie that came with different wigs and that made her way better than my Barbies, even if she did have unusually pronounced, molded eyelashes.  At home, we had a set of Tinkertoys back when they were still made of wood, and I still remember how difficult it could be to connect them together.  The coolest toy we had but never really appreciated enough was the log cabin playhouse my dad built in our back yard.  He cut down all the logs and built a little house with windows that opened and a faux brick linoleum floor.  You’d think we’d have played it in constantly, but with the typical fickleness of children, we rarely used it after the novelty wore off.

5. Food:  I’ve discussed some of my childhood favorites before, but there are plenty of others I can name.  For my birthday, I always asked my grandmother to serve hot-oil fondue.  These days it tries my patience to have a fondue meal and cook all my own food, but it’s pure fun when you’re a kid.  My mother had a recipe for beef stroganoff that I still make every now and then, even though the sauce is just steak, onions, mushrooms, tomato soup, sour cream and Worcestershire sauce.  I loved my grandmother’s lemon meringue pie and my mom’s cherry pie.  I’m fortunate to have kept most of the recipes from my childhood, so it’s not uncommon for me to break out an old recipe and enjoy a fondly-remembered treat such as the pound cake we often had.

I’m not going to tag anyone to continue this, but feel free to take on the topic or add your two cents via a comment.  Have a great weekend!

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When I was a kid, my parents decided that it wasn’t enough to keep horses, chickens, dogs and cats – they wanted something more exotic.  They procured a half-dozen peachicks and we raised them in a cardboard box under a lightbulb until the pullets were big enough to live in the barn.

One thing you’ll notice about peacocks and peahens is the tiny, tiny head.  Naturally, this houses a tiny, tiny brain – one that fixates mainly on food, especially if you’ve trained its owner to view you as a food source.  We quickly learned that hand-raising peafowl resulted in free-range, food-seeking menaces.  Every time we went outside to work, garden or simply sit in our grape arbor, there came the peacocks, begging for treats.

That would have been fine, except that the older and more aggressive they got, the more they began to demand food rather than hint about it.  Eventually they’d just attack anyone who dared set foot outside.  I think I may still have talon scars from our peacock, Scruffy, jumping on my back as I mowed one day.

Aggression alone doesn’t make peacocks bad pets.  You have to also take into account the screeching and walking around on the roof that terrifies babysitters.  Then there are the giant lumps of poo they leave everywhere they go, including all over the family cars (which really left the full service gas station attendants wondering).

One of the most frustrating things about peacocks is their lack of self-preservation sense.  I clearly remember going out to the barn after an ice storm and seeing a row of peafowl perched along the peak of the barn roof, coated in ice.  They survived, but wouldn’t it have been smarter to just go inside?

So here’s my question for you today:  What animal have you ever owned that really wasn’t suitable as a pet?  Discuss amongst yourselves – I’m off to work.

While my four-year-old niece was visiting last weekend, she told me all about her boyfriend, Connor.  There’s a girl in their preschool named Chloe who is a rival for Connor’s affections, but my niece confidently told me, "I’m going to marry him because I love him the most."

It reminded me of my first kindergarten boyfriend, Donny Tate, who brought me a bouquet of flowers from his yard one spring morning.  As I walked into the brick schoolhouse holding my foil-and-damp-paper-towel-wrapped bundle of irises and peonies, my teacher said, "Oh, are those for me?"

I replied as any self-absorbed five-year-old would:  "No, they’re for me."

Probably because of the novelty of kindergarten, I remember more things that happened to me during that single year than I do from the six years of elementary school that followed.  A lot of those memories involve my own misbehavior and the inevitable consequences.

For example, one day a friend and I decided not to go back to class after recess ended.  I can’t remember which one of us had the idea, but it seemed like a good plan to both of us…until we were hustled back into the building by our irate teacher and made to sit on the steps during recess for an entire week thereafter.

By the time I left kindergarten, most of my rule breaking was limited to talking too much.  It’s something I could still stand to work on.

I don’t remember anything more about little Donny except the bouquet of flowers.  I assume that he ended up at a different elementary school (much as my niece and Connor will be sadly separated next year when kindergarten begins).

That leads to today’s reader question:  Who was your very first admirer/crush/boyfriend/girlfriend?  Did he or she figure into your later life or disappear in the mists of time?