Yep. I think most of us could tell a story about learning about or using that word. My parents generally didn’t talk like that so we had to learn it somewhere else.
I called a kid a f*cker because he skipped in front of me in line for the school bus. He turned around and ran home to tell his mom what I had said. Bus came and picked us up while he was gone. As he ran chasing the bus I gave him the finger from the back window. He missed school that day because he had to be a sissy and run home to his mommy over a word. The next day when his mother showed up at our house to tell my parents what I had said/did, I had no recollection of the incident, That was ancient history. I was 6.
My brother and I were sitting on the arms of my Dads easy chair. I was 9 Paul was 4. He patted Dad on the head and said “oh Daddy, you are such a f*cker”. He had no idea what he had said or why it generated the reaction it did from Dad and I. My Mother was sitting on the couch and began laughing hysterically.
When the Kennedy Expressway was being constructed in Chicago, our family was living in a 3-flat half a block away from one section. I think I was 8 at the time. Several houses had been torn down. In one of the sites, a water pipe had a medium leak. It was winter and there was snow on the ground, but the water was still flowing. I channeled the water by piling up snow, and played with the snow, water, and ice in other ways. Remembering this from so long ago, it seems like I did this for hours. I finally went home after sunset, when the street lights started to come on.
When I was five and my sister nine out dad was invited to guest lecture in Merida, Venezuela for a few months. We stayed in a mostly-deserted hotel by the city center, the Plaza Bolivar. Many days mom would take us there and my sister and I would roller skate. Those metal ones you locked into your shoes. So we rolled skated and had a good time until one of the guards/police officers decided we were desecrating the memory of old Simon and banned us.
So we rolled skated in the hotel corridors. On terrazo. I have a clear memory of whizzing past a maid. They never said anything to us, I think because we were practically the only guests.
A memory from Junior school - so somewhere between 7 and 11 - school dinners. God, they were awful. Here’s the thing, we were living in a village just outside a remote small town (Workington) in the North West of England. The school was tiny and had no cooking facilities, so most meals were pre-prepared off site. Some highlights I remember:
Winter salad. Well, if you have no cooking facilities, salad makes sense I suppose - but we’re talking the 1960’s here, and it was hard enough to get a decent tomato in the summer, let alone the middle of winter. In my memory this lunch consisted of a leaf (cabbage?) with some raisins and sultanas, and probably a cold slice of ham. Served with mashed potato (see below). It would be hard to design something less appetizing for kids.
Concrete cake and custard. No idea what the real name was - this was how it was always described, for obvious reasons. Sitting at a table, with the kid to my left with just custard and the kid to the right with just concrete cake. This latter in desperation, smashing a spoon down on it to try to break a piece off, getting the angles all wrong, and the cake flying straight out of his dish and into my other neighbour’s custard. The whole table hysterical with laughter.
The worst thing: these meals were pre-prepared centrally in Carlisle, nearly forty miles away. In those days, if you drove like a maniac, you could get to or from Carlisle in, oh, ninety minutes. If you were driving a van and doing drop-offs at tiny rural schools all the way? I shudder to think how long the tall aluminium canisters of mashed potato took to get to us. I will never be able to forget the stench of it. I was- truthfully - in my thirties before I could eat mashed potato.
I was in New York, a ways outside of the city but close enough that some people could argue it still counts as part of NYC’s ‘region’, though I think more people would consider it outside. Anyway, we lived in a townhouse complex. Me and my father were out for a walk or something, and it was just approaching dusk. As we were walking through a large grassy patch, an area probably the size of a football field or a little smaller, but with taller grass that reached…up to my thighs, I think (mind you, I was like 3-4 years old at the time or so), the entire area lit up with thousands of little lights, which then took off flying into the air; we were surrounded by thousands of lightning bugs.
These were all from around six years old/first grade:
I saw a drowned kid being dragged out of a pond.
I saw my grandmother sitting on the edge of the bathtub.
One of my classmates told me, in shock, that my mother was ‘colored!’
My first day of school: Walking into a classroom of 30 students, and not knowing a single one.
Standing near a recently uprooted tree stump with one of my cousins, shortly before leaving for the hospital for my tonsillectomy.
Reading an issue of Metal Men while in the hospital room.
The funeral of one of my classmates.
I have a vague random memory of my mom picking me up from preschool in her maroon colored Chevy Vega* and me begging her to take me to Hardees for lunch rather than going home to eat. This must have been 1983, because I don’t think my sister was born yet and she was born in October of that year, so I would have been 3 years old. That’s probably my earliest memory. Also around the time my sister was born, my parents sold the Vega and bought one of those newfangled minivans that had just come out. I wanted them to order it with wire wheel covers just because I thought those were cool. But they didn’t want to pay extra for them and just got plain basic hubcaps. I didn’t like riding in the new van because I always felt sick when I rode in it, I think due to the fumes from the plastics that create that “new car smell”.
*I was really into cars, so I noticed what kinds of cars everyone drove.
I have memories like this, where once I dig up old facts I realize it could NOT have happened the way I clearly remember it.
In fact, there’s a book “So Long, See You Tomorrow” that deals with this. A boy grows up with a memory of playing in a neighbor’s house under construction, with snowflakes falling. Goes back as an adult, and the homeowners are puzzled: “We built this house in the summer, construction was May to August.”
Memories like these have gotten me to research the nature of how we store and retrieve memories. It’s not pulling a paper from a file cabinet, it’s more like sifting through a pile of scraps of paper and trying to reconstruct a memory. We pull scraps that someone has told us about, others from the wrong event, and some that our brains have just made up, for fun.
Anyhow, my earliest memory is seeing Sinbad in the alternate ending to BIG. Watching it with Nelson Mandela, on his prison deathbed…
I remember as a pre-schooler, my mother tutored kids moving from the local public school into the Catholic school, and were behind the Catholic kids. SO I stayed home and played school with her. So my first day of Kindergarten (Big school!!) and the teacher hands out a sheet with a butterfly printed on it and tells us to color it while she gets everybody settle in. Well, I had to tell her she was wrong, the directions say to color the 1’s orange, 2’s brown, etc. She knew from then on I was going to be trouble.
