5 Childhood Memories

I decided it might be fun to try this 25 day blog challenge. Hey, why not? It's pretty straight forward. You reveal new things about yourself every day for 25 days and yadda yadda. I'm not sure what the point is. Perhaps self reflection? Perhaps to let other people get to know you better?

Day 1: Five Most Important/Memorable Childhood Memories

This one may in fact be the toughest one out of all of these for me. My memories of my childhood are very sporatic. I have managed to block out large chunks of it, and I am not kidding. Not to mention that I have a horrible memory anyway. I think it's a genetic defect. Here goes nothing...

1.) Big brothers are a blessing. My brother and I were extremely close as children, even though we would occasionally fight like cats and dogs.....let me rephrase.... HE would play horrible pranks on me and ask me to do terribly dangerous things so he could watch. Because I was incredibly gullible and sweetly stupid, I would just go along with anything he said, no matter how many times I got hurt. I trusted him to a fault. One thing I CAN say though is my brother had this very noble inclination that HE could terrorize me as much as he wished but NO ONE else better even think about it!

We grew up very poor and were living in this apartment complex in West Chicago. I will just say that it was full of shady characters too, although I don't recall ever being frightened. Anyway, one day this Mexican kid from a couple buildings down decided that he wanted to steal my bike. I LOVED that bike.

This kid was older than Shaun if I recall and was pretty tough. Not only that but he had older brothers that were even tougher. I think they may have even been in a gang. Despite all of this, he puffed his lil chest out and marched right over to their apartment and demanded that this little punk give me back my bike. I couldn't believe it! I had no idea that he was going to do such a thing and I certainly never would have asked him to. I would be afraid he would get murdered! However, without much of a fight besides some threats and back talk....the bike was returned. It was sitting on the porch when I got home from school. I couldn't believe that this creature who once told me to stick my finger in a fan (WHILE IT WAS PLUGGED IN)could be so protective over me. It made me so proud and still does. <3

2.) Trailor Swimming. Yes, you read that right. When I was about 8 years old, my mother met this man. I liked him right away because I thought he was RICH. He lived in a MANSION with all the food and sweets you could ever want. He had a POOL TABLE in the basement AND ATARI with tons of GAMES. He had movies and tons of places to discover both inside and out. I was in heaven. To me, moving in with him meant living like a queen. (It's hilarious, because if I were to look at that house now, it's really not that big at all.)And to my utter delight, we DID move in with him.

What I did not forsee then, however, was that Tom (i.e Sprout, Troll, Hitler) <--- all nick names given to him by my friends) was horribly mean and kind of psychotic. He once made me write 10,000 sentences for forgetting to turn off a light. And that one example is small potatoes compared to other various forms of torture I endured. What he did not know with the sentence writing was that I had all of my friends in school helping me out. It was like a little sentence writing factory. Somehow he didn't manage to notice that my finished product had about 10 different hand writings. But, I digress.

Not only was Tom very mean, he was also a total redneck. He loved to parade around outside all day shirtless with his disgusting birth mark (a large patch of bumpy, pimply skin with very long hairs protruding from it) WHILE wearing cut off shorts which stopped only a little below his buttcheeks. He had a beer tap in the kitchen (awesome!) He had about 14,000 cars (all of them not running) in the driveway. What my mother was thinking, I will never fully understand.

He did do a few nice things for us kids. For instance, on one very hot summer day, he decided to surprise us. He lined a homemade pull trailor with some very heavy plastic and then filled it up with some (freezing) water and told us we got a pool and that we could go swimming! Shaun and i were very excited and got into our swimsuits right away. I guess we thought that a 10 foot underground pool could be installed in an afternoon. I have no idea. Anyway, we ran outside to discover this little trailor filled up with water in the front yard, no less. How anti-climatic. I pretended, quite convincingly, to be excited. We got in and the thing was barely bigger than a bathtub and cold enough to make you go into hyperthermia within 30 seconds. However, we SAT in it and splashed around and said "Yay!!!"

He did a pretty shoddy job creating it. (It leaked) And I'm pretty sure he was drunk, which was FINE with us because the ONLY time Tom was nice was when he was drunk. It was amazing. Four or Five beers and he turned into Hitler's angelic, mild mannered twin. He took pictures of us "swimming" in it and they are floating around somewhere. I wish I had them now to share with you.

Well, I am running out of time now. Plus, I have to druge up some more memories--but I will post the other three tomorrow.

Ta ta for now.