1:26 p.m. - 2011-06-06
More Childhood Memories
Senor D-land,
So the other day I was recalling some childhood memories and telling them to my wife and a good friend of hers. They said they were some of the saddest things they had ever heard. I guess until I heard them say that I didn’t realize that they were sad, just things that had happened and helped shape who I am today.
I have mentioned I didn’t have the best of childhoods. I was teased a lot and didn’t go outdoors much cause of my allergies and tendency to sunburn quickly. As a result I did not have many friends. Summers were particularly hard on me since I mostly just spent them at home by myself. And during those long ass days I had to do something to keep myself from going insane. This probably is why I enjoy doing craft projects to this day. Here how I kept busy some of those days.
I guess I was about 11 or 12 years old and I remember one summer my moms 2nd ex-husband had opened his own car repair shop. Now he was a crazy and spoiled dude. I mean I believe he literally had borderline personality disorder and his mother bailed him out of trouble all the time. He started this business with a loan from her even though he was a terrible mechanic. He had a trail of failed businesses in his wake, but because he had trouble respecting authority he never could work for anyone for very long. He had 5000 very colorful flyers printed up with his business address, shop prices, and specials. Then he had me pass them out at 1 cent per flyer. I would canvas the neighborhood putting them on peoples windshields, on their doors, etc. Like all the rest, this business ultimately failed and he moved on to whatever the next scam was. Meanwhile there was a large stack, maybe 1000 or so, of those flyers left and he let me have them. They were very colorful, like about 10 or so different colors and I began to use them for various craft projects. I remember one day taking a hole punch and actually punching about 20 sheets into confetti. It easily took me all day to do this (but kept me busy right?). It wasn’t until after I had punched them into confetti that it dawned on me that I had no reason to use the confetti. But damnit after all that work I was going to use it! So I took the bowl of it outside to the front yard and I remember throwing the confetti into the wind and saying “yay!”. Then once I had used up about half of the confetti I realized that what I was doing was retarded and went back inside. I took the remainder and put it into this clear bottle shaped like a fish that I had on my shelves. It was colorful and pretty sitting there inside the fish bottle. I still have that bottle actually, right now its filled with salt water from the dead sea in Israel. I couldn’t tell you what happened to confetti that was in there…
I’ve mentioned that we were poor. Well, that same summer I had decided to make my own version of the board game risk using that paper. I liked the game but its not anything we could afford. I build the board, but included the construct of a navy in the game as well as the land masses. I then spent several days making various sized origami boats, planes, and I think tanks too. I made enough for 4 players and then realized that I had no one to play with, being friendless and all. So I ended up taking the game pieces outside to our concrete porch and I recreated pearl harbor. I set the planes on fire and crashed them into the boats and tanks. The end result of my several days of work was a pile of burning flyers on our porch. At the time though fire did fascinate me so it didn’t matter, I was still having fun with it.
You know what, remembering that porch just reminded me of another memory. That particular house was built by my great grand parents in the 40’s, you know, back before building codes were strictly enforced. Now a days we use drywall to make walls and ceilings, back then it was just solid concrete and stone. I will say that the house was fairly cool though in the summer being all stone. So the porch had 2 large columns that held up the roof portion of the porch. However they didn’t fully connect all of the column to the roof and there was these 2 nooks between the top of the columns and the roof. Well, we ended up with some pigeons living up in there. At first I thought it was kind of cool until one of my weekly chores was to wash pigeon shit of the porch. Not really knowing what to do I thought it would be a good idea to just toss the nest they had built in the nook. Getting rid of their home should do it right? I climbed up there, took the next and tossed it into our yard. Then I climbed down and went to go inspect the nest and realized that it had eggs in it. One of the eggs had broken open and there staring me in the face was a fetal pigeon. For some reason or another I felt really bad about that and didn’t try to displace them again.
Nothing like reliving childhood memories huh?
0 comments
