It Must Have Been A Dream...
People don't put a lot of stock in kids remembering things when they're very little, but that's bullshit. I remember a lot. Too much. More than i wish i did.
Some of my first memories i know are from the crib. I know this because i can see it as i'm looking up. I was in a poorly lit room, and there were two dark shapes, one was a womans, and the other i couldn't even tell you, but they were hovering over me. I remembered this surge of terror and i remember myself crying hystericly. It's funny that my first memory is of being terrified of people. It's almost a metaphor for my entire existance thereon.
I also have a memory of being in my playpen upstairs in the living room in pitch dark, screaming my head off. And all mom did to comfort me was to drown me out by turning up some crappy country music which only made me cry louder. I was terrified of the fucking dark damnit! My dad was in the other room doing something stupid i'm sure too. What kind of parents don't check on a kid who just had a nightmare? Assholes!
I also remember being in that same playpen one morning and hearing a strange noise outside! I was now standing up and able to climb, and i climbed up to the nearby window by pulling myself up in the corner of the pen to see what was making the noise. As my little heart pounded in fear, i peeked out to see a giant box grumblingly loudly as men picked up cylindars and tipped them into it! Then the box made an even louder noise and the men walked beside it as it crept on down the road. Garbage trucks are very frightening and strange creatures when you're a baby!
The rest of it is bits and pieces of things, like remembering the yard and house and my family. The house was built on the top of a hill, and by top, i mean the crest of it. If you go to the front door you'd walk up a hill, and to proceed through the house to the back of it and out the back door, you'd walk down another side of the hill. It was the classic german-style brick red house with white trim and a neighbor about 5 yards to the left or the right of it. The driveway, looking from the street, was on the left of the house and as it lead down the hill it met a rather large (i think 2 car) white garage. The backyard kind of spindled off after about an acre into the woods where at the trough it met a creek then sloped back up the other side. On the back of the house, the basement door sat directly right of a staircase up to the second floor back door on what looked like a rickety old wooden fire escape structure that was about to fall in on itself.
That is the house.
Now, these next memories are hardly of a daily routine. They are either of joyous, sorrowful or terrifying moments. I can't place the order of them, so i will just kind of lump the memories in as best to a chronological and feeling-based order as i can. A lot of these will probably start with "i remember," so bear with me.
I remember there was a fence on the neighbor to the right of us, and there was a rotten old tree stump next to it. I was probably about one and a half years old and i loved to climb. One day, in the warm summer morning, i awoke in the basement long before my parents were up and moving, which was pretty common place. They weren't exactly the most attending parents, to be quite frank, so i was pretty well free to roam and cause a ruckus. So the tree stump, and no supervision, meant i was going to climb it. And i did, as i think i remember a frisbee or ball sitting on the nighbors side, i was trying to retrieve it by climbing the rotten old stump and then somehow lowering myself down on the other side to the caged toy. I made it to the top, and hesitated, trying to figure out how to make the transition from log, to the 2 foot gap between it and the fence, and then from there down to the yard below. As i did, i heard a tremendous "CRRRRAAACK!" The next thing i remembered was laying on my back, trying to scream as hard as i could. My stomach felt like it was on fire and as i screamed in pain, no noise came out. This terrified me even further, because i was sure that i was in really bad shape! I remember feeling like i was dying even at that age, so this must have happened after grandpa, because i understood what that meant. Or maybe i just knew it from some other source. But as it turned out, i simply knocked the wind completely out of my tiny chubby frame, and lay there until it decided to return after quite a few moments. As i screamed, finally, to my rescue came my oldest sister who was probably 8 or 9 at the time, which she would do many more times throughout my life.
I remember that my dad tried to create a slip and slide in the back yard for us with these glossy sheets of mylar or some such material too. It was this higly reflective, highly slippery material, whatever the hell it was. I recall my dad standing there, with the hose on, as we kids ran and slid and stood up and slipped and fell on it as he laughed talking to the neighbor. I'm pretty sure the neighbor said something stupid like "you should put bacon grease on it and see how they slide." My dad did his chuckle that meant "that wasn't really funny, but the image kid of makes me smile" thing in response to whatever it was that was said. The neighbors kids may have been there too, but i can't recall that. Hell, i can hardly remember if my own siblings were there, to be honest, cause i was pretty absorbed in my own joy.
Later on that summer, after we forgot about the immense fun that could be had "slipping" and "sliding" on our makeshift mylar slides, i remember looking under them with my little brother for snakes. And oh the many snakes there were! It seems to me that EVERY time i moved one of those damn slides, there were four or five garter snakes there of varying sizes. Maybe they were ribbon snakes though, cause i have seen garter snakes afterward and i'm sure they were different species. I remember knowing how to catch them from behind their head so they couldn't bite me... For some reason, afterward though, it was okay to carry them around by their tails. And later in life i would catch a rather large hognose snake, dragging it into the house by it's tail to show mom. She was unimpressed, and kind of shrieking "get it out!!! TOOOOM!" And my dad was laughing, which made me laugh, as he egged it on.
Very few of my memories of my parents are this good. And i would like to share my favorite. It was when i was still very little, my little brother was there and we were in Florida. St. Petersburg Florida to be exact. Mom and dad and i were at this hotel, i had these little plastic boats that i would play with in the pool, my brother was still too little to play and shockingly enough our parents were parenting enough to put swimmies on us. I remember playing with those boats. Florida will always hold a special place in my memory because it was the only time i remember everyone in the family being happy... We were walking along the beach and everyone was holding hands, mom, jenny, dad carrying beau, but i was kind of wandering around picking things out of the sand behind them, trotting along to keep up when they started to separate. Dad saw something in the ocean, and i turned from my shell pieces to see, and there it was! A little crab was walking about in the surf. So naturally, being a boy with a small hand full of projectiles, i hurles some of my broken shells at the crab, scaring it into the deep. Much to the dismay of my sisters i may add. But i stood there to watch for a few moments wondering where "cwaaab" went, and as i turned, i saw one of my favorite burned images. By burned images, i mean those images that just stick with you and affect you for the rest of your life, but there in the setting sun by the ocean, was my family in front of me walking hand in hand down the beach, dad with his arm around mom as she held Shellys hand who held Jennys hand.
I remember my grandpa Otten very fondly. He was always a quiet old man who had this playful spirit about him, and i suppose my mother is right that i am like him, because children seemed to be his greatest joy in life. I was playing at the top of my driveway one day in my own little world. It was sunny out and my back was turned to the street as i played. All the sudden the noise of tiny rolling wheels startled me from behind and i turned my upper torso to see a small red police car hotwheel with one tiny blue light in the middle of the hood rolling at me. I stood to retrieve it and there was my grandpa, laying prone on the driveway laughing as i did likewise for joy. The policecar was accompanied by a fire engine which i still have today. The policecar has since been lost though, and it still makes me sad to know it.
He was always very quiet, but loved to play games. I remember he always liked to play. I remember one birthday or christmas he brought me this little playset of a farmhouse, farm people, complete with all the animals from chickens and pigs to horses and cows. It had a tractor, the farmer, his wife and their dog. There was even a wooden fence to keep your livestock from roaming the living room floor unrestricted! Recently i found one of the pigs in with a bunch of toys and just seeing it brought mist to my eyes in the memory. I instantly recognized it. It's amazing to me how something can seem so little to so many but so much to just one person, but i understand it completely. I am a junk collector to the untrained eye, but everything i stash has some kind of passing sentimental value that will never be understood to those on the outside. And some day i'm sure, when and if i have a family of my own, and i myself pass on, my family will root through all that "junk" wondering "why he held on to it?"
I barely remember gramma Otten at all from when i was little. Most of what i remember of her was my mother and her fighting about some stupid thing or another.
I remember that mom and dad fought a lot. One night we ordered a pizza, that was placed squarely on the coffee table. I was so hungry that i got over zealous to get pizza, and once again, nobody was keeping an eye on me, and i grabbed a piece and dropped it on the floor. Dad got pissed and took the whole pizza, box and all, and hurled it (while sitting on the couch) onto the cieling of the living room and cussed at me! A little insight into how bad things actually were though, is that my older sister proceeded to pick the slices off the cieling and after mom and dad went away arguing, we ate them.
I remember my little brother Beau very well. We were inseperable as soon as he began to walk. I wasn't able to say "brother" and called him my "bubby" which was probably my way of saying "baby brother" which i regret to this day, because everyone in the family still calls him "bubby Beau." I remember that one of his first games was to sit on the porch and squuash the big black carpenter ants that were unlucky enough to wonder into his reach as he screamed "DUKKAH DUKKAH DUKKAH!" We also played "that's not daddy, that's a fucker" on the front porch waiting for dad to show up to visit after he and mom got divorced. I also remember sitting at the bottom of the driveway and throwing rocks at cars as they drove by the house. Once we hit this Trans Am and this typically 80's piece of trash got out and started yelling at us (two unsupervised kids) so we ran home as fast as little kids could run. The unfortunate thing was that my sister Shelly was babysitting us at the time and didn't know what to do. Finally the toolbag gave up and left i guess. I also remember how worried i was the time Beau swallowed a marble, also when Shelly was babysitting us. An ambulance came to the house and everything because Shelly didn't know if Beau was in trouble or not. Later, while visiting granma Harris, he pooped it out, which i found hillarious!
I also remember the time that Shelly had all her friends over and was watching Friday the 13th on cable. They all went running out the front door of the house at the end when the girl goes to drive off, drops the key on the floorboard and looks up to see Jason pressed on the window of the car, machette in hand. I remember watching on as the tire of the car broke through the bridge as Jason smashed in the window, and then the girl got focused, gassed it and the car sped off. I think she backed up over him or something too. That part is foggy and to be honest, even though i love horror movies, i found this one pretty campy and haven't watched it since. Motel Hell, on the other hand, is a fucking classic! "All kinds of critters go into farmer Vincents fritters!" And that was another one i saw as a little little kid.
Mom and dad got divorced at some point though i think i already mentioned that, and the memories of and afterward are some of the worst.
This is the part of the story where i'm going to have a little trouble writing, because things get very dark... I don't remember a lot of good memories past the ones above from when i was really little. And i think this is where i'll take a break.
Some of my first memories i know are from the crib. I know this because i can see it as i'm looking up. I was in a poorly lit room, and there were two dark shapes, one was a womans, and the other i couldn't even tell you, but they were hovering over me. I remembered this surge of terror and i remember myself crying hystericly. It's funny that my first memory is of being terrified of people. It's almost a metaphor for my entire existance thereon.
I also have a memory of being in my playpen upstairs in the living room in pitch dark, screaming my head off. And all mom did to comfort me was to drown me out by turning up some crappy country music which only made me cry louder. I was terrified of the fucking dark damnit! My dad was in the other room doing something stupid i'm sure too. What kind of parents don't check on a kid who just had a nightmare? Assholes!
I also remember being in that same playpen one morning and hearing a strange noise outside! I was now standing up and able to climb, and i climbed up to the nearby window by pulling myself up in the corner of the pen to see what was making the noise. As my little heart pounded in fear, i peeked out to see a giant box grumblingly loudly as men picked up cylindars and tipped them into it! Then the box made an even louder noise and the men walked beside it as it crept on down the road. Garbage trucks are very frightening and strange creatures when you're a baby!
The rest of it is bits and pieces of things, like remembering the yard and house and my family. The house was built on the top of a hill, and by top, i mean the crest of it. If you go to the front door you'd walk up a hill, and to proceed through the house to the back of it and out the back door, you'd walk down another side of the hill. It was the classic german-style brick red house with white trim and a neighbor about 5 yards to the left or the right of it. The driveway, looking from the street, was on the left of the house and as it lead down the hill it met a rather large (i think 2 car) white garage. The backyard kind of spindled off after about an acre into the woods where at the trough it met a creek then sloped back up the other side. On the back of the house, the basement door sat directly right of a staircase up to the second floor back door on what looked like a rickety old wooden fire escape structure that was about to fall in on itself.
That is the house.
Now, these next memories are hardly of a daily routine. They are either of joyous, sorrowful or terrifying moments. I can't place the order of them, so i will just kind of lump the memories in as best to a chronological and feeling-based order as i can. A lot of these will probably start with "i remember," so bear with me.
I remember there was a fence on the neighbor to the right of us, and there was a rotten old tree stump next to it. I was probably about one and a half years old and i loved to climb. One day, in the warm summer morning, i awoke in the basement long before my parents were up and moving, which was pretty common place. They weren't exactly the most attending parents, to be quite frank, so i was pretty well free to roam and cause a ruckus. So the tree stump, and no supervision, meant i was going to climb it. And i did, as i think i remember a frisbee or ball sitting on the nighbors side, i was trying to retrieve it by climbing the rotten old stump and then somehow lowering myself down on the other side to the caged toy. I made it to the top, and hesitated, trying to figure out how to make the transition from log, to the 2 foot gap between it and the fence, and then from there down to the yard below. As i did, i heard a tremendous "CRRRRAAACK!" The next thing i remembered was laying on my back, trying to scream as hard as i could. My stomach felt like it was on fire and as i screamed in pain, no noise came out. This terrified me even further, because i was sure that i was in really bad shape! I remember feeling like i was dying even at that age, so this must have happened after grandpa, because i understood what that meant. Or maybe i just knew it from some other source. But as it turned out, i simply knocked the wind completely out of my tiny chubby frame, and lay there until it decided to return after quite a few moments. As i screamed, finally, to my rescue came my oldest sister who was probably 8 or 9 at the time, which she would do many more times throughout my life.
I remember that my dad tried to create a slip and slide in the back yard for us with these glossy sheets of mylar or some such material too. It was this higly reflective, highly slippery material, whatever the hell it was. I recall my dad standing there, with the hose on, as we kids ran and slid and stood up and slipped and fell on it as he laughed talking to the neighbor. I'm pretty sure the neighbor said something stupid like "you should put bacon grease on it and see how they slide." My dad did his chuckle that meant "that wasn't really funny, but the image kid of makes me smile" thing in response to whatever it was that was said. The neighbors kids may have been there too, but i can't recall that. Hell, i can hardly remember if my own siblings were there, to be honest, cause i was pretty absorbed in my own joy.
Later on that summer, after we forgot about the immense fun that could be had "slipping" and "sliding" on our makeshift mylar slides, i remember looking under them with my little brother for snakes. And oh the many snakes there were! It seems to me that EVERY time i moved one of those damn slides, there were four or five garter snakes there of varying sizes. Maybe they were ribbon snakes though, cause i have seen garter snakes afterward and i'm sure they were different species. I remember knowing how to catch them from behind their head so they couldn't bite me... For some reason, afterward though, it was okay to carry them around by their tails. And later in life i would catch a rather large hognose snake, dragging it into the house by it's tail to show mom. She was unimpressed, and kind of shrieking "get it out!!! TOOOOM!" And my dad was laughing, which made me laugh, as he egged it on.
Very few of my memories of my parents are this good. And i would like to share my favorite. It was when i was still very little, my little brother was there and we were in Florida. St. Petersburg Florida to be exact. Mom and dad and i were at this hotel, i had these little plastic boats that i would play with in the pool, my brother was still too little to play and shockingly enough our parents were parenting enough to put swimmies on us. I remember playing with those boats. Florida will always hold a special place in my memory because it was the only time i remember everyone in the family being happy... We were walking along the beach and everyone was holding hands, mom, jenny, dad carrying beau, but i was kind of wandering around picking things out of the sand behind them, trotting along to keep up when they started to separate. Dad saw something in the ocean, and i turned from my shell pieces to see, and there it was! A little crab was walking about in the surf. So naturally, being a boy with a small hand full of projectiles, i hurles some of my broken shells at the crab, scaring it into the deep. Much to the dismay of my sisters i may add. But i stood there to watch for a few moments wondering where "cwaaab" went, and as i turned, i saw one of my favorite burned images. By burned images, i mean those images that just stick with you and affect you for the rest of your life, but there in the setting sun by the ocean, was my family in front of me walking hand in hand down the beach, dad with his arm around mom as she held Shellys hand who held Jennys hand.
I remember my grandpa Otten very fondly. He was always a quiet old man who had this playful spirit about him, and i suppose my mother is right that i am like him, because children seemed to be his greatest joy in life. I was playing at the top of my driveway one day in my own little world. It was sunny out and my back was turned to the street as i played. All the sudden the noise of tiny rolling wheels startled me from behind and i turned my upper torso to see a small red police car hotwheel with one tiny blue light in the middle of the hood rolling at me. I stood to retrieve it and there was my grandpa, laying prone on the driveway laughing as i did likewise for joy. The policecar was accompanied by a fire engine which i still have today. The policecar has since been lost though, and it still makes me sad to know it.
He was always very quiet, but loved to play games. I remember he always liked to play. I remember one birthday or christmas he brought me this little playset of a farmhouse, farm people, complete with all the animals from chickens and pigs to horses and cows. It had a tractor, the farmer, his wife and their dog. There was even a wooden fence to keep your livestock from roaming the living room floor unrestricted! Recently i found one of the pigs in with a bunch of toys and just seeing it brought mist to my eyes in the memory. I instantly recognized it. It's amazing to me how something can seem so little to so many but so much to just one person, but i understand it completely. I am a junk collector to the untrained eye, but everything i stash has some kind of passing sentimental value that will never be understood to those on the outside. And some day i'm sure, when and if i have a family of my own, and i myself pass on, my family will root through all that "junk" wondering "why he held on to it?"
I barely remember gramma Otten at all from when i was little. Most of what i remember of her was my mother and her fighting about some stupid thing or another.
I remember that mom and dad fought a lot. One night we ordered a pizza, that was placed squarely on the coffee table. I was so hungry that i got over zealous to get pizza, and once again, nobody was keeping an eye on me, and i grabbed a piece and dropped it on the floor. Dad got pissed and took the whole pizza, box and all, and hurled it (while sitting on the couch) onto the cieling of the living room and cussed at me! A little insight into how bad things actually were though, is that my older sister proceeded to pick the slices off the cieling and after mom and dad went away arguing, we ate them.
I remember my little brother Beau very well. We were inseperable as soon as he began to walk. I wasn't able to say "brother" and called him my "bubby" which was probably my way of saying "baby brother" which i regret to this day, because everyone in the family still calls him "bubby Beau." I remember that one of his first games was to sit on the porch and squuash the big black carpenter ants that were unlucky enough to wonder into his reach as he screamed "DUKKAH DUKKAH DUKKAH!" We also played "that's not daddy, that's a fucker" on the front porch waiting for dad to show up to visit after he and mom got divorced. I also remember sitting at the bottom of the driveway and throwing rocks at cars as they drove by the house. Once we hit this Trans Am and this typically 80's piece of trash got out and started yelling at us (two unsupervised kids) so we ran home as fast as little kids could run. The unfortunate thing was that my sister Shelly was babysitting us at the time and didn't know what to do. Finally the toolbag gave up and left i guess. I also remember how worried i was the time Beau swallowed a marble, also when Shelly was babysitting us. An ambulance came to the house and everything because Shelly didn't know if Beau was in trouble or not. Later, while visiting granma Harris, he pooped it out, which i found hillarious!
I also remember the time that Shelly had all her friends over and was watching Friday the 13th on cable. They all went running out the front door of the house at the end when the girl goes to drive off, drops the key on the floorboard and looks up to see Jason pressed on the window of the car, machette in hand. I remember watching on as the tire of the car broke through the bridge as Jason smashed in the window, and then the girl got focused, gassed it and the car sped off. I think she backed up over him or something too. That part is foggy and to be honest, even though i love horror movies, i found this one pretty campy and haven't watched it since. Motel Hell, on the other hand, is a fucking classic! "All kinds of critters go into farmer Vincents fritters!" And that was another one i saw as a little little kid.
Mom and dad got divorced at some point though i think i already mentioned that, and the memories of and afterward are some of the worst.
This is the part of the story where i'm going to have a little trouble writing, because things get very dark... I don't remember a lot of good memories past the ones above from when i was really little. And i think this is where i'll take a break.