childhood-memories

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand.

People ask me where I got my x-ray powers. I inherited them from my parents in parental supervision. Erase the dots and your doubts if you think that I was 'raysed' alone.

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells__e becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.

The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents_ house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.

A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person__ prosodic inner tune.

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

And that's when I heard the whisper in my heart's ear: "It's not about your childhood. It's about who you are!

...some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school...

Sometimes I return back to the state of mind I had as a child when I believed nothing was impossible.

I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk again.' (I'll get some today.) 'I need this ironed properly.' (I'll do that today.) 'How hard is it to buy milk?' (Silence.) 'You forgot to call the plumber.' (Sigh.) 'Goddammit, put on your coat, right now, and go out and get some goddamn milk. Now.' These messages and orders brought to you by my father, a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee.

They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, 'Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.' And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn't like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand's arm: 'Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.' It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don't like cherries.

Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.

Does childhood really happen? Do we imagine it? Everyone remembers something else....

By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.

My childhood was a drag show!

Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.

My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.