Jeri Smith-Ready

Things I miss from childhood

For you are young and life is long
and there is time to kill today.
--Pink Floyd, "Time"

Andrew from Did I Say That Out Loud? (who also mined Pink Floyd for a suitable quote) tagged me with this meme (I think it's a meme--I'm still getting down with this freaky blog lingo). Anyway, here's a sample. I tried to limit it to things I absolutely can't get anymore, which would eliminate honorable mentions such as Walter Farley books, swimming, Busch Gardens, licking the beaters when my mom made cakes, and somersaults (okay, that last one may be forever behind me, if my chiropractor has his way):

1. Bedtime: Another way of saying I miss my dad. He'd give the best back scratches*, while telling me a story or making up a song ("Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" was my favorite). He was no Garrison Keiller, mind you--most of his stories went nowhere and the songs were repetitive, to say the least. But they made this little girl giggle.


2. Recess: Hopscotch, jump rope, monkey bars, and slick, silver-hot sliding boards! Games of tag, hide 'n' seek, Red Rover, Duck Duck Goose! My third-grade teacher would push us on the swings so hard, we thought for sure we'd achieve the ultimate dream of the loop-de-loop. Nowadays, playground swings have seat backs so kids can't fall out, and my teacher would be led away in handcuffs for -gasp!- touching a child's shoulders.


3. My uncle's house: In Hayes, VA, near Yorktown. It was my dad's childhood home, a five-room house on the marshes of the Chesapeake Bay (although it was only two rooms and an outhouse when he grew up there). I can still smell the salty air and see the fiddler crabs scuttling across the driveway. The people next door had about a dozen coonhounds and a new litter of kittens every summer.


4. Record players: Stacking several LPs on top of one another, playing records at the wrong speed just for laughs, and most of all: that -thup!...crackle... -sound the needle makes when it hits the vinyl.


5. The big dirt pile: One summer my family put in a patio and as a result had a huge mound of displaced topsoil in the backyard. It was ten, maybe fifteen feet tall. For weeks my brother and I drove his Matchbox cars over that mountain of mud and played a hundred games of King of the Hill, all of which I lost, being eight years younger (no one imparts the lesson that "life isn't fair" like a big brother). I loved that big pile of dirt. I thought it would always be there for me.
   

Anyway, I'll tag Mark at The Roost next, because he's so damn due for a post.

*as did my mom

• posted by Jeri @ 6:22 PM
• 3 comments