You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Childhood’ category.
With no shame, I present a sandwich from yesteryear, served at The Viking in Ogunquit, Maine, a (now sadly defunct) build-your-own sundae place where our grandparents’ propriety demanded we lunch before indulging our grosser appetites.
The sandwich itself arrives on a heavy, chipped plate: peanut butter (the spackly kind with transfat and sugar) and cheap grape jelly (the kind that breaks into wobbly little crumbs, not suave slabs of gel) on flabby white bread, served with a tall styrofoam glass of root beer and a pile of slightly soft potato chips.
Delicately insert one chip into sandwich. Do not break the chip. Do not let Granny catch you “playing with your food.” Take a bite and feel the crunch under your teeth meld with the unctuous pb and the cool jelly. Sip root beer and feel the fizz dance in your mouth. Eat to the very edge of the chip.
Covertly watch Granny until she’s occupied reprimanding one of your siblings; it won’t be long. Insert another chip.
I was a late bloomer.
In seventh grade, I had one close male friend: Alfred. Alfred was just my height, slim, with wispy black hair always in need of a trim, and the shadow of a mustache blooming on his lip. His voice was gentle and he put a mouth over his hand when he laughed, like a Japanese schoolgirl.
I was a chunky girl with thick glasses, a clumsy haircut, and a ready braying laugh, always carrying a stack of books.
He never talked to me about girls, not even my pretty friends. I think maybe I had decided he wasn’t interested in girls, though I never gave it much conscious thought.
One day as we walked down the hallway together, talking in desultory fashion of the Honors English class we’d left, Alfred suddenly pushed me into the nook that housed the drinking fountain. Trapped there in the cinder-block corner, I opened my eyes wide, and closed my gaping mouth just in time as he loomed in and planted a kiss on me.
He pulled back, looked me softly in the eyes, a question on his face.
Reader, I punched him.
Really. I don’t know where this instinct was born. I didn’t intend it, I was ashamed of it then, and I’m ashamed of it now. I hauled off and socked him in the eye. He sported a faint shadow of a black eye for days, a week… I don’t really know how long, since we stopped spending much time together after that.
Cross-posted from metachat.
Today I present you with some notes I took from my senior year spring break before I toss them in the trash. (By the way, I went to an all-girls Catholic high school.)
25 March
Left for Galveston with twins, Paige, Jada, Diane and Debbi. We stayed with the twins’ aunt and granny. We walked on the beach coz they wouldn’t let us go out. At 3:00 a.m. Paige sees two guys outside the window. We freak. They drive to the beach and get out. Cops bust them. Turned out to be Jon, John, Justin and Anthony. (Boys from the school next door to ours.)
26 March
Go wake up guys at “SS Galveston Motel”. Sleazy! Meet up at the strand. Split up and went back to Bolivar. Guys came to take us back. Go to Yacht Club then Hilltop Motel. Drank some beer and tried to read tarot cards. Jada got really drunk and we went back.
27 March
Go to Jamaica beach after Bolivar. Pack bags to “go home” but meet Jon and John at Hilltop and stay there. Go into Houston to NRG. Leave at 2:00. Find Robert, Ken and some guy Steve they picked up on the seawall — they follow us back. John and I play with a oujia board in the bathroom until 6:00. Contacted a spirit in Limbo. Went to sleep.
The week went downhill from there with a slight sunburn, a game of “quarters” and some dancing on a jetty before returning home. Ah, youth.
I return from a family reunion, resplendent in a shiny carapace of baby spittle, yogurt, and biter biscuits lavishly applied by my two youngest nephews, N, 22 months, and A, 8 months. This impressive exoskeleton, resistant to sharp objects, thudding blows, and all forms of washing, is punctuated by smeary blossoms of Fluffernutter (and, yes, spittle) courtesy of S and J, 7 and 5. M and L, 7 and 9 10, displayed a mature tendency to retain both spittle and snacks within their interiors, or at worst to emit them in the vicinity of some other adult. Kudos to them.
Airdna fastidiously abstained from all application of spittle and foodstuffs, instead graciously providing me with a henna tattoo.
Me in my dorm room 18 years ago when I was turning 18. A few seconds after this was taken, the sun hit my shirt and I melted into a pool of my own angst.
Okay, I wasn’t that gloomy, just a drama major.
Note the purple plastic dinosaur attacking a teddy bear. Those were the days I would stand on my bed and sing songs from Paul Simon’s Graceland to all who stopped to listen.
Wow, new entry so soon. Yes, well, that’s because I just got the news that I have another skin cancer (but the friendly kind). That spot on my nose, the one that wouldn’t heal, the one I had removed last week, will be the cause of yet another scar on my face. As if I don’t have enough already. This is where I am right now:
I’m eight years old again, my own dog has gone mad, leaving hideous scars marking my face. I feel like Frankenstein’s monster. I am amazed when others don’t notice my scars, because that’s all I see. This is what fuels the low self-worth fire, which leads to grade school ostracism, which ignites the suicidal thoughts that plague me until my 20s.
I don’t want this new scar, the one I will be getting in September, to define or confine me the way I let the first ones do. I would like to think I have a better sense of self-respect, or at least where to look for it. So thanks little basel cell carcinoma, little monster, and happy transmigration.
As children, we have so little concrete information about the world, and such a random collection of experience-based learning, that we construct oddly poetic worldviews and beliefs.
Some of these misconstructions of knowledge have their origin in semantic misunderstandings. Having been told repeatedly by our parents that we could be anything when we grew up, I decided at about age 4 that I would be the Pope. (We weren’t a Catholic family, and I had not the faintest idea of the Pope’s role; I just liked the hat.) Given the same sort of encouragement, my sister N. eagerly looked forward to becoming a circus bear.
Other childhood misconstructions are simple mechanisms for coping with common fears. Like many children, I believed a) that the night was filled with horrors, looming unseen in the dark, hungry for my innocent self; b) that keeping my head under the blankets protected me from these monsters. As an extension of this logic, and based on I-know-not what previous evidence, I further hypothesized that c) if I kept my head under the covers and held my breath for exactly sixty seconds, I was safe uncovered for the rest of the night. Although I cannot claim that my hypothesis was proven, it surely gained credibility as, night after night, no monsters attacked.
Ah, childhood beliefs. Some are just plain silly, some are quite touching, and some have the strangely comforting Lynchian quality that pervaded my own childhood.
I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was some sort of bathtub vampire. —– Dan
Naturally.
In a shocking exposé, a Maine couple announces that schools are scheming to teach young people, actually going so far, in some cases, as to use books:
“They see it as, they say, ‘Hey, it’s a book, let’s expose the kids to it, and see what they learn from it,’ ” said Minnon, who with his wife operate [sic] a greenhouse on Route 202 in Lebanon.
The Minnons, parents of a first-year student at Noble High School, object to his class’s study of The Catcher in the Rye. Not satisfied with the school’s provision to allow their son to study another book, the Minnons are attempting to prevent the entire first-year literature class from studying Salinger’s classic.
(link thanks to Bookslut)
I was sitting in the park yesterday evening, silently giggling at the two little boys frolicking in the clearing before my bench, and rereading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:
In the same way, for children to learn about culture they cannot be mere video cameras that passively record sights and sounds. They must be equipped with mental machinery that can extract the beliefs and values underlying other people’s behavior so that the children themselves can become competent members of the culture.
Even the humblest act of learning — imitating the behavior of a parent or a peer — is more complicated than it looks.
A few sentences later, Pinker quotes AI researcher Rodney Brooks on the difficulties of imitative learning. Brooks gives the example of a robot observing a person struggling to open a jar:
The robot then attempts to imitate the action. [But] which parts of the action to be imitated are important (such as turning the lid counter-clockwise) and which aren’t (such as wiping your brow)? How can the robot abstract the knowledge gained from this experience and apply it to a similar situation?
As I read this passage, the two boys abruptly dropped their game of “Blast-off to Outer Space!” and switched to the ever-popular game of “Like Daddy Does.” The younger of the boys picked up a spindly fallen branch and announced “I’m gonna break it like Daddy does!”
The bigger boy immediately followed suit, falling upon an equally reedlike stick. “Me, me, I’m gonna break it like Daddy does!” Their exaggeratedly tortured expressions were caricatures of exertion as each grasped a tiny stick by the ends, pressed the center to a knee, and, muttering cries of exertion and frustration, happily failed to effect a snap.
As I sat reading and waiting for my bus, a weary-looking older woman walked by, one shoulder slumped to accommodate her halfhearted clasp on the tiny, wriggling hand of her tiny, wriggling granddaughter. Suddenly, the little, little girl stopped their laborious progress down the street to start bouncing and pointing at a nondescript minivan. “It’s Santa’s car!” she cried joyously.
What? I thought, sneaking a peak between the pages of my book and the brim of my hat.
“What?” Grandmother replied. “Whose car is it, honey?”
“It’s Santa’s car!” the girl pealed again, louder and with absolute confidence. Grandmother, seeking a reality check, caught my eye. We exchanged looks of pure puzzlement, while Granddaughter inspected the unremarkable blue paint. “It’s beautiful,” she intoned, hushed and reverent.
Elli
Elsa
