Thank you all for sharing these many memories. Some are truly lovely, others hilarious, but all have helped to pull me out of my mini-funk.
A personal treasure…It begins rather routinely, I was around 12 years old. My family consisted of 5 siblings, my parents, and myself. We recently rented out the basement apartment and began renovations on it.
Some random weeknight, all of the kids were upstairs watching TV when my dad yelled up the back steps for us all to get downstairs to help clean. We all grumbled, and complained as we herded up to head down. I even specifically remember attempting to refuse to go because I had never even been in the basement to make a mess.
We all got downstairs and the apartment was pitch black and the door was open. Suddenly, the lights were switched on and my mom round the corner and throws confetti and my dad follows and yells “gotcha!”. Turns out they had finished the bathroom renovations and were throwing a bathroom opening party complete with food (no we didnt eat it in the bathroom), baloons, and a ribbon-cutting. Still makes me smile 
We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, and certainly not many “things”, but my parents always knew how to make simple, mundane events into something memorable and fun.
A buddy and I had been at another friend’s house drinking beer and hanging out. Afterwards I was driving to his house to drop him off and decided to take some back roads. I had a decent buzz going but not drunk. This was in the middle of a very snowy winter and it was probably 20 degrees or so. The normally dirt road we were on was covered with a thick, compacted layer of snow and snow was plowed up a good two feet on either side of the road. I stopped in the middle of the road and put the car in park so we could take a leak. We walked to the back of the still running car, he on one side, me on the other and did our thing.
As I stood urinating I was completely overcome by the beauty of the night and the scenery. It was a full or nearly full moon, not a cloud in the sky and the snow covered farm fields that surrounded us reflected the moonlight to the point that it nearly seemed like daylight. Despite the brightness of the moon I was able to see a zillion stars in such a way that really gave me a sense of my place in the overall scheme of things. Long after we finished peeing we stood (the only sound the rumble of the dual exhaust on my GTO) looking at the sky and not saying anything. It may sound strange but it was a treasured moment in my life.
That reminds me of another very early memory in my life. We were living “up north”, and I can’t remember if it was Fort St. James or in the Northwest Territories, but I was very small. We were driving somewhere in the winter, through a rural, open, flattish landscape, and it was one of those bright, cold, clear winter days: nothing but blue sky and white snow and the road, all lit by the bright winter sun. I remember the sparkle of ice on the trees, on the snow, on the fences along the road. And I remember my parents stopping the car because sitting on a fence post was a huge snowy owl. It was big, and it was white, and it was sitting there, so unexpectedly. I think my parents were remarking that you didn’t see them during the day. It was gorgeous.
That’s actually one of my very earliest memories from childhood, that beautiful snowy owl in the crystal blue, white and gold winter day, and our family being in awe at the sight.
When I was little, I had this music box. I’m not sure which song it played, but my parents still remember it. I just know that the song was very sad and I liked it very much. But the problem was that I would open up the song to listen to it and the song was so sad that it made me cry. So somewhat regularly, I would open up this music box and cry. My parents eventually took it away from me because they figured it probably wasn’t healthy for a little boy to be doing this every day.
I have a very similar reaction to Lionel Richie’s “Hello”. I well up everytime I hear it, even if I’m out in public. The only difference is that I can’t decide if it’s a sad cry or a “my, this is beautiful” cry.
27 October 1965.
A young lady and I in her house after school. Alone. And this was the day that we went beyond kissing. Wayyyyyy beyond.
I remember being in India at 10 years old and being wholly fascinated by the first tandoori oven I’d ever seen. I was squatting in the dirt next to it, as it was just a pit dug into the ground. There were these women smiling and watching me, and they were cooking rotis and somehow they were sticking to the sides of the pit! Fascinating.
I’m 6 and 8 years older than my brothers. The four years I was in High School were horrible in many ways; for somewhat over a year in the last two, Mom was bedridden, Dad out of work, both depressed, and me trying to keep the whole thing running and myself into college.
Fast forward to the “stop year” I took while in college. I realize that the age I’m going to list will sound to US students like I spent my college years asleep; for engineering in Spain this is normal. I was 23 and had 3 “fails” after doing 3 “grades”; at that point I took a year to “pick up the fails” (which I did and never got a leftover again, I ended up graduating sooner than everybody else I started with), back home. So I’m 23 and Lilbro is 15. One day he comes home asking whether I have the song from the latest schweepes ad in my records. Yes, I do; I inform him that the only reason he isn’t eating my Police Greatest Hits is that I’m not going to waste a great record in such a demeaning way and play it for him. He started rummaging through my records and discovered many other songs he liked.
He credits that as being the first day he thought of me as “his sister” rather than a live-at-home, blood-related babysitter-cum-cook; we finally had something more and something good in common. I credit it as the day our “schweepes song” in-joke was born; I’d always considered him an intelligent human being but that one was definitely a much more “between equals” conversation than any we’d had until then.
Both of my brothers sometimes get tongue-twisted and start calling me Mamá instead of Mariluz. They just say “mamá…ma-ma-maaaariluz, you know what I mean, anyway wathever they were going to say” I see it as a funny consequence of all those years feeding them and giving them baths, and I’m very glad that we can laugh about it.