My best friend was a boy named Charlie, we were friends from the age of four until his death in his 30’s. We invented many games (including the drawing game made famous by the Surrealists, Exquisite Corpse, although we didn’t call it that of course). Most of them were just for us but we also had a game we called Kings and Queens which involved as many kids as wanted to play. It was very simple. One person was the King or Queen and all the other players were slaves. The slaves built a royal throne, clothed the King or Queen in robes, found some kind of sceptre, danced and sang at his or her command, and made supposed-to-be-delectable concoctions for him/her in the kitchen. It was fun being a slave, but pretty boring as royalty. Still, it was so tempting that when you got tired of sitting there and acting imperious there was always someone who wanted a chance at it.
As I remember it (from over 65 years ago):
Casey and Murphy were digging in a ditch,
Casey called Murphy a dirty son of a…
Beaver, beaver sitting on a log,
Along came a bumble bee and stung him on his…
Cocktail, ginger ale, five cents a glass,
If you don’t like it shove it up your…
Ask me no questions and I will tell no lies,
Casey hit Murphy and now he’s paralyzed.
It was at “Ask me no questions…” that I got hit. I didn’t understand the double-entendres at that age.
First Grade spelling bee, I was the last kid standing and the word was -no. I mustve been a little shocked to be the last one standing and slipped down the rabbit hole fixated on know, I know I know, but no. It went completely over my head, but since I knew how to spell know they gave me a billion chances to spell N O, but no I only spelled know.
I’ll probably do one of these :smack: later, but, what rhymes with log that got stung?
“Rock” would work better than “log”.
That’s still no reason to punch a child in the face, even once, much less repeatedly. My sympathies, **panache **. I also had a father who blew up for what seemed to be no reason.
I was somewhat gullible in my youth - yeah, and about some things I still am - but as an example:
The girl who lived next door was a bit older than I, so I assumed she was smarter. She told me if you were touching a window screen when lightning flashed, you’d get electrocuted. Our screens were metal, so there was some logic there. But when it was thundering and raining, our windows were usually closed, so it wasn’t an issue.
She also said that when you go to sleep, your heart stops beating. I remember lying in bed at night with my hand over my heart just to see. To this day, I don’t know if she was messing with me or if she was that ignorant.
Well, a rap on the bum, at least. 
I’m too young to remember this but my mom would use it as a story to tell my first dates and she wouldn’t lie.
When I was about two we were living in a multi-story apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. Following some Scandahoovian custom, I’d not had my hair cut and it would not be cut until I was three so it was long. blonde, and wavy. Afternoons the housewives in the building would gather on the front stoop to shell peas, knit, and gossip. At one point, mom got up to stir the stew leaving me in a playpen under the watchful eye on the neighbors.
Coming back down she found I was standing in the pen with my clothes off and the women were laughing uproariously. “Aw, come on,” my mother protested, “Name me a two-year old who hasn’t liked to take his clothes off!”
“It’s not that. Until just now we thought he was your daughter.”
Remembered another one.
I think it was the last day of school, Third Grade. The teacher gathered all us kids together for a field trip – a quarter mile walk to Verna’s Cafe, the only restaurant in town, where the whole class received ice cream cones. I don’t remember if the teacher paid for them or if they were donated by Verna.
Picking the blackberries in our backyard with my sister and my mom making homemade cobbler out of them.
To this day I’m a sucker for anything that uses real blackberries.
Oh god, so many memories…
Mom, who always worried that I would be cold and kept me bundled up way too snugly, once put me on a silk quilt while I was half naked. I still remember how wonderful the sleekness and cool felt. Mom saw my reaction too, and also still remembers it about 50 years later. The quilt ended up being mine.
Neighbour came hone with a dead bird stuck in the grill of his car. I took it out, wrapped it in paper (tissue? toilet? paper towel?) and buried it in a sandbox they had out back. Told my parents what I had done and they insisted it was dirty and germy and should be dug up and disposed of properly… I moved every grain of sand in that box repeatedly and couldn’t find it. Told my parents it had already gone to heaven. It was years before I realized that the neighbour had already removed it.
I remember being 7 or 8. We lived across from a park. They were expanding the sidewalks over the summer, so they’d cut up the grass into sod rolls to make way for the pavement. At night, around midnight, my dad would take me and my older sister out with a wheelbarrow to collect the sod and lay it down in our less-than-impressive back and front yard.
I didn’t give a damn about the yard, but the delight of going out when I normally wasn’t allowed and stealing really tickled my fancy.
One of my first memories was of my mother and I on an overcast day. I was strapped in a bassinet on the passenger seat of our brown car. I had a clear view of my mother who was driving the car. It was just the two of us. She was wearing a brown coat, long pale blue skirt, matching blouse and a white hat. Over-dressed for a casual outing by today’s standards, but this was the 50’s, so not uncommon. She talked to me as she drove, but I don’t remember what she said.
She parked the car, put me in a stroller and we entered an old, musty smelling building, which I later figured was a post office (mom and others in line were holding envelops to be mailed). There were dark wooden floors and counters and ceiling fans with dark wooden blades. As we waited in line I drank something sweet from a bottle. That’s where my memory ends. It’s a very vivid memory, one that I recall often.
The only problem is that my mother never drove a day in her life and there was no post office in our town matching my memory. Mom said it never happened, but the memory is so clear and not at all like a mis-remembered dream. I still can’t figure it out. It happened somewhere, maybe an alternate reality.
In my mind, the analogy there is an object with so many coats of paint that its profile has become distorted. Every time we remember something, it’s like another coat of paint. Ultimately, we don’t remember things. What we remember are our memories of those things, and those memories are constructed over time.
It was probably “rock”. Like I said, it was over 65 years ago.
When I was about 3, we moved into a new house, and the next-door neighbors had recently moved there from Brooklyn, NY. It was their first time living in a house. One day, the wife asked my father, “What do you do with the grass in winter?” My father replied, “You roll it up and put it in your basement.” I remember the husband out in the yard, trying to roll up their lawn (it wasn’t sod), and my mother came out and told him my father was just pranking him.
He told this story for years. I thought it was mean.
Here’s another version of the same song about two Irishmen:
And here’s a guy on youtube singing a similar version:
This isn’t my childhood memory, but one of my kids just reminded me of it, so it’s A childhood memory:
We were taking turns playing a video game called Super Contra. My son was just a little nipper at the time, but on screen, he was this bulked-up, hulked-out berserker type, spraying bullets and wreaking destruction. Excited, he gave out a battle cry, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
We just about wet ourselves laughing.
That’s a great analogy. I’m so stealing that.
I notice I didn’t post an actual memory yesterday as I had intended.
When I was about four I had a pedal tractor. For reasons unremembered I drive it off of the driveway and down the street, around a corner or two to wind up on the sidewalk of a very busy street. Irrigation was still common and I had stopped at one of the big concrete boxes with valves on them to direct the water, wanking on a big wheel, luckily locked.
A woman stopped, determined where I belonged and took me, along with the tractor, back home. I got spanked for that one.
A bit profane, but innocently so…
When I was about 5 I was playing in my sandbox when a big kid stopped by to play with me. He was really nice. Some other big kids passed by and made fun of him, and he said something back to them. I had never heard it before, and asked him about it. He said it was just something you said to people you didn’t like, and then went on his way.
When I got called in for supper, I proudly announced that I had learned a new word.
“Really, Sean, what is it?” they asked. My grandparents were sitting at the table.
“F*** off!” I said. I was so young and dumb I didn’t even know it was two words.
And there was dead, shocked silence and I knew I had done something wrong but had no idea what, and I was terrified… and my parents calmly explained to me that there are some things that nice people just don’t say and that happened to be one of them. And I wasn’t in trouble at all; in fact, I learned something new, which I liked doing.
I still remember the rear and the relief and the joy of learning, and I didn’t say that again until I was 12.
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia
Last fall, my sister and I were out in Los Angeles for a get-together in memory of my aunt, who had died a few months earlier. While we were there, we figured we’d drive by the house we spent the first few years of our lives in, and as a result, found that our house is a museum.
I figured I’d share that since the memories I’m sharing in this post are from that house.
Quite possibly my earliest memory, likely from the summer when I was 3 years old: if you go in the front door of the house, about halfway in on your left is a long stairway to the second floor. When you hit the second floor, do a 180 to your left, and there’s a shorter stairway to a deck on the roof of the living room below. (If you see where one small section of the second-floor roof is raised slightly with a lot of glass underneath, that’s where the shorter stairway would have come out onto the roof.)
For some reason, I was by myself on the second floor, where the bedrooms were. There were baby gates on both stairways, of course, but I’d managed to get over the baby gate to the stairway up to the roof. But then I wasn’t able to get back again. I remember squalling like anything, and three or four women, including my mother, running up the stairs from the ground floor.
Another memory, which had to have happened in our last winter in the house, when I was nearly four: it was snowing outside, and my father roused my sister and me to look out the window at the snow. (It melted when it hit the ground, of course: we may have been at the top of Laurel Canyon, but it was still Los Angeles.)
He didn’t know yet that his company would move him to the DC area the next summer, and after that, snow in winter would become considerably less of a rarity for us.