Gimme a memory. Let’s keep it to good ones for now.
I was seven or eight. My parents and I were living in a rented condo on the beach in Ventura, CA. My father was out of work, and had been for quite a while, but I was too young to really understand how scary that was - we were getting by, financially, and I was reveling in my father’s undivided attention. Every night at sunset my father and I would walk on the beach, collecting seashells.
One night when we went down for our walk, the tide was the furthest out we’d ever seen it. It was strange to walk on sand that, on any other night, would have been 15+ feet underwater. The shells we found that night were incredible - big, beautiful, and whole.
I can’t remember precisely when this happened. I’m guessing it was about 20 years ago, which would put me in late twenties.
It was Christmas morning. I and one of my sisters had made the trip from out-of-state to our childhood home, which was in an older suburban neighborhood (square blocks, nice-but-small houses on small lots), so the three of us and my parents were gathered and had just opened our presents.
I went to the front door for some reason (not because the doorbell rang or anything), looked out, and there, in the front yard of the neighbors across the street (I didn’t know them; they’d moved there since I’d left home), was a beautiful pony, with a big red bow on its halter!
Oh my god! Every kid’s dream – a pony on Christmas morning! I called my parents and sisters, and we all gathered at the door to witness this amazing sight. Since one of my sisters’ frequent childhood whines was, “EVERYBODY has a horse but me,” we found it especially amusing and delightful.
We didn’t get to see the gift recipient’s reaction to the pony, but my sisters and I still talk about the Christmas we saw the pony on the front lawn.
London, last year, during my European vacation. My boyfriend and I went for an evening walk to Trafalgar Square and climbed up next to the lions on Nelson’s column. Spent a lovely few hours sitting there together, looking out at the city lights and kissing whenever we felt the need to. Which was often.
I remember the first time I came here from Canada to visit my now-wife, ten years ago. The whole situation was nerve-wracking, as you might understand. Well, there I was, at her parents’ home. It was a Saturday morning in December, and I was standing out front while everybody slept, having a cup of tea, looking out at the neighborhood. I was sort of overcome by the feeling that I belong here, and this is supposed to happen to me. The real possibility that I could be coming here to stay, and be married and start again from scratch, is the biggest, best thing to which I have ever looked forward. My determination was solidified, and the path all laid out in my mind in that moment of calm, out front with my cup of tea.
I remember being a young girl in Ohio and swinging on the swingset we had in our back yard. It was summer and our lawn was carpeted with dandelion blooms—I imagined that I was flying over a yellow ocean.
About 35 years ago, during the summer before I went into Kindergarten, my mother and I flew from Oregon to Kansas to visit her family. We landed in Wichita where my aunt picked us up, and we had a long drive to the SE corner of the state where Grandma, Grandpa, and a multitude of aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. We got in quite late, and I was immediately put to bed. Mom and Grandma took off to do some visiting, leaving Grandpa to keep an eye on me.
Grandpa’s idea of keeping an eye on me was to roust me out of bed, sit me down at the kitchen table, give me milk and cookies and a pile of pennies, and teach me how to play poker.
We were still sitting there playing when Mom and Grandma got home, and boy, did they lay into him! 
I must’ve been around 4 or 5, somewhen around 1978, and our family was living in a Prowler trailer that my parents had set up on our property. We lived in the trailer for a few years while they designed and built our house from scratch during the dry seasons.
My Mom was cooking a breakfast of bacon and eggs in the tiny little Prowler kitchen. Then, as now, I loved the smell of bacon and was enjoying the ambient aroma immensely. I wanted to make the appreciative sound of a good loud sniffff “Mmmmmm” like big people could, but my young little nose just wouldn’t make a sniffing sound when I inhaled. I made plenty of noise exhaling though. So I stood there next to the stove, watching my Mom fork the spattering bacon, exhaling all over our breakfast until she laughed and told me to go “smell” breakfast while sitting at the table.
Reading my first ‘chapter book.’ It was the summer between kindergarten and 1rst grade and I was having my tonsils out. My mom and dad went to the grocery store to buy me some things to while away the hours on the hospital ward – you know: coloring books, paper dolls and so on. Mom started loading up her arms with Little Golden Books, grabbing all the ones she knew we didn’t have yet. Dad asked why she was buying so many, and Mom replied that I read them very quickly.
"Well, then, " said Dad, “Get her a real book.” And he picked up a Whitman copy of Heidi.
“She can’t read that! She’s just out of kindergarten.” said Mom.
“If she can read 15 picture books, she can read this.”
So they bought it for me. Right after the surgery I was too sick to notice it, but the next morning I felt better, and I snatched it right up. I read the first chapter and remember thinking, “This is all I need. It’s all I’ll ever need.” When Mom and Dad came in at visiting time they found me reading Heidi aloud to all the children and nurses on the ward.
Obviously, it wasn’t true that books are all I need or will ever need… But my love of books and reading has been a constant in my life, and one of my true loves. The memory of that first book is one of my favorite memories.
I met my SO online. Once we started talking, he’d get up at 5am to talk to me before work…I got off work at midnight. Time difference you see. The first time we talked on the phone we talked for, I’m not kidding, 12 hours. Eventually he came over the pond to see me. We met at the bookstore where I worked. I was sat in the cafe waiting…and waiting. And slowly losing my mind. When I couldn’t take it anymore I went in back to the break room. Where I got paged that someone was looking for me. I could show you the exact spot I was standing in when he came up to me. I could tell you just how his footsteps quicken when he finally saw me. I could tell you about the rest of the evening but…that’s none of your damn business 
.
I was sixty and it had taken over thirty years to overcome the fear of flying that I had developed in the early 1970’s. But I would see Paris..
I sat outside of perhaps the most famous bookstore in the world, Shakespeare and Company, with the used book of poetry my granddaughter had just bought me. I had never been able to find this particular edition – the large copy of the poems from Dr. Zhivago. But I had gone almost straight to it when I had entered the store.
This small bookstore, though moved across the neighborhood from its original location, had been a gathering place for writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Here, Hemingway picked up his mail and James Joyce published Ulysseus.
I had a comfortable spot on a bench under one of the cherry trees while I waited for my granddaughter to finish shopping. It was April and the cherry trees were in full blossom. Across from the bookstore was the left bank of the Seine and then a full view of Notre Dame.
A breeze stirred. And as if on cue, the bells of Notre Dame began to toll, calling the people to mass. As the bells tolled for a full five minutes, the breeze became a soft wind and absolutely showered me with pink cherry blossoms from the surrounding trees.
Kilometer Zero Paris
I was five and in first grade.
He was probably six- maybe seven. He was very tall and blond. I think his name might have been Sean or Patrick.
He was waiting in line to go to computer class. The class split up for computer class because we didn’t have enough computers for everyone. He was a the end of the line and I was sitting at a desk. It wasn’t my desk, though. It was someone else’s. I don’t remember why I wasn’t at my own desk.
I was always very impressed with that boy. Not in the sense that I wanted to chase him around giving him kisses. I was actually impressed with him- he was very talented. He could whistle and snap and he sang with this strange vibrato that I thought sounded weird and fake, but the adults loved. He mustn’t have been as smart as I was. When we went over to the other classroom (The classroom with themean teacher who yelled) he sat with the other children learning, I suppose, to read while the three of us in the “smart group” sat together and did worksheets or taught each other things like simple multiplication and division (very simple. like twos and threes and tens) or adding numbers over 100.
Sean or Patrick, though, always seemed more worldly than me. He taught me things in kindergarten that his parents had taught him. he told me things in kindergarten like how to multiply by eleven (up to 11X9) or that 10 + 20=30 and 100+200=300 just like 1+2=3.
This one day, though, it was a sort of free study time. Our teacher was helping individual students, not standing at the front of the room or sitting in her desk. Several students were milling about the room. I stayed put because I was always concerned with being a good little girl at school.
I was watching the children in line, waiting to go to the computer room when I saw Sean at the end of the line absentmindedly snapping his fingers. I watched his hands, marvelling at how he made noise with them like a grownup. I decided to try it myself and turned my attention to my own hands, contorting them to match his. Sean noticed me and smiled, then held up his hands to show me the position and slowly demonstrated how to snap. I tried a few times and then- success! I beamed up at him and he grinned back at me.
This may sound odd, but I was amazed at his kindness. Before that, any time I had known someone to have a special talent (such as whistling, pulling coins out of ears, this mouth-popping thing my dad does that I still can’t get, making faces with your hands, they kept the actual process a secret. If someone did something and I asked them to teach me, they usually told me it was magic or some such thing. Everybody in the class was impressed with Sean for his talents and I found it incredible that, not only would he willingly share one with me, but I didn’t even have to ask. He just saw me trying and taught me.
HA! I kept thinking of bad memories… but then this one came. I was in 2nd grade. We were painting with watercolors. They had these white plastic trays, four colors (red, blue, yellow, green?) in a row. Little hockey pucks of powdered water color. When we were finished, Mrs. Watson asked four of us to clean up the supplies. I can’t remember the other three guys. Anyways, we all took all the trays and brushes back to the sink. We cleaned all the brushes, then started in on the urinal cakes of paint…
They were were all way past half dissolved before she stopped us… 
I went to NYC about 10 years ago and my cousin took me to the Empire State Building - on they way to the balcony thingy there was a guy dressed in a gorilla suit standing in the foyer/hallway. I was trying to figure out WTF? When he moved and the woman in front of us had hysterics - she screamed so loud she made me jump back, causing a domino effect on the people behind us…
Took me a half an hour to get WTF was with the gorilla suit…
Now-DH and I had recently started dating - I think we’d been together a couple of months, tops, at this point.
Someone in his unit had a daughter taking her first Communion, and they were having a BBQ party for the occasion. It became the typical ‘men out with the grill, women’s hen party in the kitchen’ type thing, which I loathe. I looked up to see DH beckoning me from the back door. I slipped outside, and he took me to the far end of the yard, where the neighbor’s red Dachshund puppy was hanging out. He knew how much I missed my family’s red Dachshund, so when he saw the neighbor outside with the puppy, asked if he could bring me to play with her.
I thnk that’s when I fell in love with him.
A grandfather who loved a lost little child, who would take her fishing, take her out of the chaos. Who always said she caught the biggest fish, and she always did. Even though he died when I was 5, I still remember the unending gentleness, kindness and love.
I was home for the summer from university. My parents’ house was in a pretty, small town in the Kootenays (Kimberley, BC) at the time, and the house backed onto undeveloped wooded hilly land. I used to like to go out walking “in the woods” along the old roads and paths up there, and sometimes our family cats would follow me some of the way. It was a beautiful area to have right out the back yard, and I knew I was lucky to be able to enjoy it.
One day, I walking in the woods, trying to get the various paths mapped in my head, just enjoying the forest and the quiet and the beauty, when I saw a young deer. Deer are such lovely creatures, and I didn’t want to startle it, so I backed slowly away a bit, and stayed quiet, just watching the deer. I watched it bend and eat, watched it raise its head, flick its ears, looking around, always aware. But it moved closer to me. I backed away. It moved closer. I backed away. I was grinning like a fool by this time, as the young deer seemed so unafraid, in fact, it was approaching me. I slowly backed up again, and the deer approached again. After a while, I’d walked backward on the path around the bend, up a hill, and so on, the deer always with me, seemingly always trying to get closer.
That was the day I was followed in the woods by a deer.
I still like deer to this day, despite the way the ones in the area where I live now graze shamelessly on lawns, gardens, and vegetables. Eh, they were here first, and deer gotta eat, too.
Any Summer day between 1968 - 1973. Riding around with my dad in his 1962 Ford Falcon, as he ran errands in town, then went to check on the people who rented an ancient farmhouse that he had inheireted from an Uncle.
The house wasn’t much to speak of, huge but plain. I don’t think he was making much money off of it in rent, but aslong as it was being lived in, he didn’t have to worry about it falling into disrepair. “Hillbillies” doesn’t even begin to describe the family that lived there. And there was a mess of them. The father scared the hell out of me, he looked like Jack Elam. The mother was “not quite right” and stayed in the house. There was an ancient granny that sat in a rocking chair on the 10’ high portch, and would holler down to me, to go to the barn and see the puppies/ kittens/ piglets/ calf or whatever else had reproduced since our last visit. All the kids were boys and some were the victims of my childhood crushes, (which may have been why Daddy stopped taking me with him when puberty hit.) :o
Down the road from the farmhouse was another house that Daddy took care of. It was the family home of one of his old teachers. The teacher was elderly and lived in town with his daughter. This house was not livable and kind of spooky. It was surrounded by trees and brush and some of the windows were busted out. I usually sat in the car while Daddy went in to check it out. But one day it was pouring rain and even on a sunny day that stretch of road was dark and shadowy, so I went in with him.
I was wandering around upstairs, and entered a room with the remains of a child’s bed. The whole house was kind of musty, so I didn’t notice atfirst, what else was in the room…
Then I saw it!
A HUGE TURD!!!
In the middle of the floor! :eek:
I wasn’t grossed out, I was impressed. We had already seen evidence of dogs downstairs, I just thought a dog had created it and left it on display. I called my dad to come look. He was not pleased. I mentioned that the dog must be huge.
He informed me that it was from a human not a dog. And that vagrants sometimes camped out in the house. Then he went to get something to scoop it up with, but the turd did not want to be scooped. It kept rolling away from him. It would’ve been funny except I was busy trying to grasp the fact that an adult human had intentionaly shat on the floor. By this time, my easygoing, mild mannered dad was livid. He finally caught the turd and flung it out the glassless window. But the sound it made when it landed, was not the sound of a giant turd hitting wet bushes or weeds, it was more like the sound of a huge turd hitting wet metal, then bouncing and rolling down something. :dubious:
He had parked the car really close to the house because of the rain.
We looked out and saw where it had landed on the roof, rolled down the windshield and come to rest at the base of the antenna.
That
Was beautiful.
Thanks fishbicycle
When I was about 10, I climbed the highest tree in a forrest - to the top.
I could see for miles and miles.
Far, far away, I saw a tiny road with tiny cars on it.
For the rest I was surrounded by green and blue.
Green from the many trees beneath me and the incredible blue sky.
I guess it was my first sense of utter happiness and peace.
A few years ago I was hosting the New Years Eve party. I cooked on Dec 30, but Dec 31 was a work day for me and I had to get up extra early to do some more baking. I had complained about this the night before.
So, the alarm goes off at 4:30a, I stumble to the kitchen, grumbling and snarling, to do some more baking. I hear my daughter’s alarm clock go off. “Silly girl,” I thought. “She forgot to turn off her alarm during Christmas break.”
She comes out, wearing her purple Christmas pajamas, her purple Christmas robe, and her purple Christmas slippers, and says, “I got up to help you bake, Mommy.”
Sweetie got to lick the bowl AND the beaters AND the spoon.