What is your favorite, but somewhat meaningless, childhood memory?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t mean meaningless as in stupid. But meaningless like you don’t quite know why it is remembered. Most of our childhood memories probably center around holidays or vacations or other such things. But what about those sweet poignant little snippets of just another afternoon with the family?

I’ll start:

I’m the oldest child of four, I’m in my mid-teens and it is a Saturday afternoon and my parents are out. My brother was hit in the face with a baseball at a little league game and has a huge bandage covering half of his 10-year old face. My sister has been trying in her five-year old way to help him with various tasks like eating and washing his face. (They have always been and still are very close.) We are crowded under the kitchen table giggling while we set up a huge domino circuit with small building blocks. They weave in and out of the chair and table legs and we are trying so hard not to knock any of them over prematurely so that we will not ruin our course before it is done. My other brother comes in and is excited so he runs to gets the camera and snaps some pictures of us in all of our domino-course glory.

That’s it. Nothing profound. Just a beautiful little slice of the simple suburban life that I yearn so much for on the worst of hectic adult days. :slight_smile:

2

I remember the neighbor’s dog playing with my weeble-wobble when I was 2 or 3 and we lived in an apartment.

–Cliffy

3

Sitting in my grandparent’s appartment, playing with some plastic toys, most notibly some colored plastic men that had cylinder bodies and cup-holder-shaped arms so you could click 'em together. I was marvelling at how high the ceiling was, and how many books it seemed like my grandfather owned.

Nothing more than that. No idea why it’s stamped so permenantly on my memory.

4

I remember being about two or so and being outside in the first snow of my life, and dropping the garden hose gun into a perfect patch of snow and being amazed that the gun made a perfect gun shaped hole in the snow. It’s my earliest memory, and I have no idea why.

5

When my little brother & I (from about ages 7 to 11 or so) couldn’t find any other kids in the neighborhood to play with, and Mom wasn’t busy, we’d sometimes play “Doggy Baseball.” That meant that Cindy the black cocker spaniel got to play, too, and we had to use a soft rubber ball, and take turns at hitting the ball that Mom pitched at us, and Cindy fielded and retrieved. We just got such a kick out of it, but usually Cindy didn’t want to release the ball, and would turn her head away and waggle her rear & tail like crazy when you tried to get that ball out of her mouth. When we finally did get it from her, of course it would be all slobbery - which meant that when you smacked it with the bat, it would go “splat” and you might get dog slobber all over you.

Good times, good times.

6

I remember going out in the back yard on a warm afternoon following a morning rain and making dozens of little balls out of the firm but still malleable mud. Kinda like brown Play-Doh.

7

My mother hitting Tramp the dog for scratching at the front door to be let in. We moved and left Tramp at our old house when I was three, so I had to be very young.

8

This would have been in the summer of 1976. I was out in the yard with the guinea pig, which was grazing. Birds were singing on the phone wires and butterflies fluttered about. I was watching a hole in the ground to see if any small furry creature would emerge when I looked up and noticed a fuzzy black and white spider on bush in front of me. It had green fang like things and cool eyes. I got my spider book and looked through it, then concluded that it was a jumping spider of the genus Phiddipus.

When I told my mother about it she said Phiddipus was a cute name.

9

My brother was 5 years younger than I, but we always had fun together. I remember these two huge bush-like hedge things near the driveway of the house we grew up in. We would get in underneath and just talk and invent storylines about people etc. (Entertaining yourself is such a lost art, probably why I love RP stuff so much)

It also is kind of a sad memory, since my brother went the highly conservative christian route, he’s working on his masters in divinity at Bob Jones now, so we have stayed as closewhat with me being a gay pagan and all.

10

My mother used take me to the lakefront here in Chicago, by Montrose beach on really windy days. The parking lot would go to the edge of these huge cement block steps on the shore. She drove a big blue 1974 Chevy Monte Carlo. We would get a hotdog from a stand nearby and pull up to the cement blocks and the waves crashing on the blocks would splash over on to the car. We would cheer at the big splashes. I remember sitting in the front seat with her, my little feet up on the blue vinyl dash and I was pushing the big preset buttons on the radio.

warm and fuzzy feelings, I think I’ll go do that this weekend.

11

I remember the first time I heard a record on the radio and wanted to have my own copy. It was “Walk Right In” by The Rooftop Singers, in 1963, when I was still four years old. I was with my mom and grandmother, and we were in the record department at Kresge’s (I think) at the Centre in Hamilton, ON. This was before malls as we know them - it was a long, long strip of stores with a common walkway in the front (it’s been an indoor mall for about 30 years now).

Back then you could play a record before you bought it, so they had it put on for me. The vivid part is my mom holding me up so I could see the record spinning on the turntable as it played. Then, they bought it for me and I was so happy to have it!

12

I was about 2 in this memory (I know it’s no more than that because of the house involved). We were moving out of one house into another, and I’m sitting on the steps to the front porch watching the movers and such around me.

I look in the sky and see a bright red latex helium balloon that had apparently escaped its owner. I watched it and wanted it to come to me. My little two-year-old brain had yet to master the laws of nature, and I still thought that if I could visualize it floating toward me, it would. Alas, it did not.

A random memory, but one of my favorites. It really speaks of how a 2yros brain works and how they view the world.

13

When I was little, my grandfather gave me a baby deer. He had found it standing beside the body of its mother which had been hit by a car. We kept it in cardboard refrigerator box in the kitchen, feeding it bottles of milk, and then taking it into the woods behind the house so it could learn how to find food. They released it when they felt it was old enough to live on its own.

When my grandfather was teaching me to drive, he insisted I learn to drive stick-shift. He’d make me stop the Jeep on a hill in our field, and then drive onward again. Every time, the car died on me. Finally, I stormed back over to him in frustrated tears. “Why do I have to learn stick? Almost all cars are automatic. I’ll never need to know this.”

He looked at me solemnly and intoned, “Lissa, what if you need a getaway car someday, and the only one available is a stick-shift?”

Faced with that devestating logic, I went back out and practiced until I learned.

My grandparents took me to Disney World. One morning, grandpa went up to the hotel front desk to ask for directions. There, he met a little boy who had been seperated from his parents, but didn’t speak English. Grandpa, who learned German while he was stationed there in the Army was able to find out the kid’s first name, but the boy apparently didn’t know his last name.

He hurried back to our hotel room to tell us about the little lost boy and how the staff was searching for his family. “If they can’t find his family, do you think they’ll let us keep him?” he asked grandma.

Another, more recent, story about grandpa:

During the last presidential election, grandpa got an invitation from the Republican party to go to a fundraiser dinner in Washington attended by the president. Grandpa couldn’t go, and he called me to ask me my opinon. “Will president Bush’s feelings be hurt if I don’t go?” he asked. “I’ve sent a card to him telling him why I can’t come.”

14

I don’t know how old I was, maybe three or four, and my mom and I were visiting a neighbor. There was a little blond boy about my age, and he invited me in his room to play with his toys. I remember he had a Superman themed room and all kinds of boy-toys I never got to play with, being a girly-girl and all.

But the prize…the Sit-n-Spin. I remember asking what it was and his demonstration. Then I got my turn, and I recall so clearly how I thought this must be the coolest toy in the universe. I was begging and crying for that toy until Christmas came around and I got my very own.

I can’t remember anything else about the kid, or the house, and I don’t even know if we ever went back, although surely we must have at some point. But that Sit-n-spin…I’ll never forget it. Just yesterday we were browsing at the local thrift store and I saw one and the memory popped back up. I had to get it!
I can’t wait until Isabella is old enough to try it out. I shall be the coolest momma in the world!

15

I don’t remember how old I was but I must have been short. I remember grabbing onto a bar that was underneath the kitchen table and swinging on it.

A few years ago I was a my parents house and I saw that table folded up in the basement and sure enough the little metal bar was bent from my swinging and the underside of the table was covered with little Ludy scribbles.

16

During the summer of '63 my father decided to move the whole family to California from Washington. Just before Thanksgiving my mother, 2 sisters and youngest brother took the bus back to Washington for the holiday. My father had to work the day after Thanksgiving and my brother and I spent the day with our grandparents. After work my father picked us up and we went to a hamburger place, it would have been in the Pasadena area where my grandparents lived. We were almost done eating when a blonde walked up to place an order. My father said hi to her and she and my father made small talk for a few minutes. She asked my brother and I if we would like an ice cream cone. We said yes and she bought us one. When we left my father asked us if we knew who the blonde lady was. We didn’t know her name but I had seen her on TV. It was Debbie Reynolds.

17

Most of my early memories have some signficance attached to them. For example, the earliest memory I can dredge up is when I was something less than two years old, when I fell and broke one of my front teeth. Since we moved out of that house when I was about 2, it’s literally the only memory I have of that house. I don’t remember the next house we lived in after that at all, but my mother claims that nothing significant happened there, either.

I have lots of memories from the age of 4 or so:

[ul]
[li]We had a swing set in the back yard with a “trapeze” swing that consisted of a metal bar hung from chains. My sister (a year younger than me) and I found a garter snake in the back yard, and put it inside the trapeze bar. Our mother “freaked out” when we told her, only because she was afraid the snake might have been poisonous and bitten us.[/li][li]My sister and I got a toy kitchen for Christmas, and we LOVED it. There was even a room in the basement that we could use to play house with the kitchen set.[/li][li]Our grandfather built a miniature house in the backyard for us. I remember the outside of the house vividly, and I remember being extremely disappointed when we moved and couldn’t take it with us, but I have no memories whatsoever about what the inside of the house was like.[/li][li]I have this one memory that is simply of a group of adults talking about fishing in the liviing room. Both of my parents were there, but I don’t know who the other adults in my memory are/were.[/li][li]Our house was within walking distance of a small grocery store. My mother used to take us to the grocery store by foot, and I remember that I always got a candy necklace when we went.[/li][/ul]

18

My very first memory, I remember so well my daddy and I fishing puppies out from under the old truck with a yard stick.

I have no idea why…

I also remember walking around the store with my mom faking a british accent, even to people we knew.

I hate eing grown up :frowning: b

19

It was a summer morning in north Seattle, and I was wearing one of the dresses my grandmother used to make for me out of old fashioned cotton calico. I ate my breakfast and went outside to play. As I walked out the back door I smelled the sweet, damp soil freshened by a rain shower the night before. I crouched down to examine mounds of earthworm castings next to perfectly round holes in the earth. As I made my way along the side of the house I stopped to smell the lily-of-the-valley growing along the foundation, as well as the new pitch on the pine tree. When I got to the sunny front yard I was entranced by the intensely blue sky behind another tall pine, which was full of white butterflies fluttering amongst it’s branches. I am still able to bring that memory to the present, scents and textures.

I have a memory which is undoubtedly a melange of memories. My grandparents lived in a brown house with yellow trim in Ballard with a
huge rock garden/retaining wall in which my grandmother had planted alyssum and basket of gold. Across the street is a monkey tail tree, which is so strange and interesting, and I always want to go touch it. In the front of their house is a huge blue hydrangea. In the back of the house there is a pear tree and my grandmother’s garden, which is in raised beds made of red brick. She always let me pick and eat the ripe cherry tomatoes, and she always let me pick flowers to bring in the house and fill vases for every room. There is an arbor at the gate with yellow climbing roses spilling over in the hot sun, and the scent is delicious. There is a garden bench swing, and I swing amongst the colors and scents, and all is right in my world.

So many more memories, but those are two of my favorites.

20

I was five and in gymnastics class. I had been working tirelessly to get a backbend-kickover down becuase I was so frustrated that I couldn’t do it. I stayed up nights and practiced in my room. I stayed after gymnastics with my teacher (only about five minutes. I had to go to ballet next.) and she’d spot me a few times. One day I announced that I could do it myself and I didn’t want a spot. My mom was there and I noticed while I was halway upside-down that she was laughing at me. I was crushed until I completed my little stunt and realized that she was laughing because my nervous gymnastics teacher, whom I’d asked not to touch me, was holding onto my ponytail to keep me from falling.

Earlier, as a know-it-all kindergartener, there was a boy in the morning class with a name pronounced mick-KELL. My teacher would mention the boy and I would correct her. it’s MY-KULL. not MICK-KELL. I was SURE the boy was named Michael and not whatever he was actually named. And it drove me nuts that my teacher couldn’t pronounce his name properly.