Star was my first dog. And he was mine. I was three-ish? He was a corgi, and we tortured him. Mainly by putting him in our little pink doll strollers and trying to push him around. I’m sure we tried to dress him too, but I can’t confirm that memory. Star did not like the neighborhood kids. I remember not understanding that. And I remember us standing just out of reach with our friends, looking in wonder at Star freaking out and trying to reach us. He was great with us, but grew a substantial fear of the other kids. I remember mom saying it was because they would come and harass him when we weren’t home (and he was out back). I hate to think of that. Eventually my parents made the decision that he was becoming too much of a threat, likely soon to bite one of the neighbors. So they put him up for adoption. Mom might have explained this to us, but I obviously didn’t understand. I do remember the day his new owners came for him. He knew. Anyone else that came to the door he would always go and say hi to. Not this time. I remember the lady was a hippie dippy, long long hair, stuck in the early 70’s type. I want to say she had a hippie dippy guy with her too, but that’s kind of fuzzy. I remember not understanding what was happening, but Star kept trying to slink into the kitchen, and mom and the lady kept trying to coax him out. I thought him going to see this lady was a good thing, but I didn’t know why, it’s just that everyone else was trying to achieve this so it must be a good thing. Didn’t realize he wouldn’t come back. I don’t remember the aftermath. Probably better that way. Not too long after that we got Snuggles (my cat), and then our family beagle Rosie. If this ordeal had not happend, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to share my life with Rosie and Snuggles, but sometimes I can’t help but to wonder what it would have been like to grow up with Star.
As like most children at Christmas, we were obsessed with Roudolph. Forget Santa, we want to see the red nose. I fondly remember looking out the window, pulling back our rough old curtains, swearing to each other that we could see the little red light up in the sky. Who knows, maybe we saw a plane. But it was Roudolph. We were sure. And if one of us claimed to see him, then all of us claimed to see him too (hey, we didn’t want to be the one person who couldn’t see him…wasn’t that a famous psychology experiment?).
Our parents played along with everything, likely because it was a way to get us to go to bed. “Look! Rougolph is coming! Quick get in bed or Santa won’t be able to come in!”. Dad would even drum his fingers on the underside of our old 70’s coffeetable to make it sound like they were landing on our roof. Temporarily landing that is, because we weren’t in bed. “Quick! Get to bed!”. I’m amazed now that it worked on us… but really, we wanted to be taken in.
I also remember being obsessed with seeing movies with reindeer. I remember one year this movie came out, it may have just been a ‘made for TV’ movie, and it was all about a real reindeer. I’ve searched throught the movie lists, and the only one that somewhat resembles my foggy memories is “Prancer”. So no Roudolph, but real reindeer! Not cartoon, or claymation. But the movie was on past our bedtime. So after suffering through all the TV previews, showing us all the excitement and adventure that we would be missing…we headed off to bed. This is where Josie became my accomplice, and our ridiculously huge Christmas tree by our stairs became handy cover. Oh we watchted the movie. Hiding behind the tree. Peeking through the branches. We even got brave and decended the stairs a bit. It was better than I had imagined. In fact, it was so awesome that I couldn’t stop myseld and blurted out something…not sure what I said, I think it was something to Josie. Or maybe to the TV. Whatever I said in my uncontrollable excitement (probably “Wow! Look Jo!” like an idiot), yeah.. it got us caught. Crap. Back to bed. At least they were recording it for us on VHS. I don’t remember watching the tape later though. Guess it wasn’t as exciting as the forbidden viewing.
This morning I sleepishly opened my eyes to the memory of Keji washrooms. This sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not. The trigger was my fully opened window, which after a very windy night gave our bedroom an outdoorsy air…then combined with Peter’s toothpaste, memories came flooding in.
When we were young we used to camp in the more ‘urban’ parts of Kejimkujik Park (opposed to the back country camping experience). Most of the time there we dedicated to driving our bikes all over hell and creation. And I fondly remember at the end of the day, me and my sisters (yes Mom, ‘my sisters and I’) would trek off to the nearest washroom to brush our teeth and get ready for bed. Along with all the other campers in that section. Which was kind of neat as a kid to experience a community of campers getting ready for bed at the same time. But the best thing about the Keji washroom memory was everything else that went with it. Play grounds (big swings), swimming, biking, exploring, canoeing, perogies at the beach canteen, the sounds of froggies at night, amphitheater excursions, singing on the way back from the amphitheater in the pitch black night with flashlights a blase. Corner Master Store. Down by the Bay. And we all wanted to sing the harmony parts to show how grown up we were.
This one had actions with it, and was one of those ‘deep concentration’ kind of games… (like when you would make someone believe they were falling through the floor…but that’s another story).
One person (the victim) would sit with their back facing the leader, close their eyes, and concentrate… the person directly behind them would ‘run the show’, and any others around would chime in on the chorus, which went like this:
“Concentration, concentration, people dying, children crying” - this would the accompanied by the leader hitting the subjects shoulders on each syllable, like playing the drums.
Then the leader would say the verses, which would be paired with actions to make the verses feel real to the victim. The verses I remember are:
- Crack an egg upon your head and let the yolk run down (repeat), let the yolk run down (repeat)
- Crush an orange on your head and let the juice run down (etc)
- Stab a knife into your back and let the blood run down (etc)
and there may have been one about spiders… In between the verses would be the drum playing ‘concentration, concentration’ part (done by everyone present), then the big finish would be “tie a rope around your neck” which would be repeated over and over (with the action of draping a rope around the victim’s neck). It was repeated until the leader was ready, after which they would yell “and pull!!!” (pretending to pull the invisible rope).
The goal was to have your victim so taken that their head would pull back a little when you said ‘pull!’. We were also happy to just scare each other.
I think we learned this from our neighbour Lisa. But apparently it’s one of those wicked kids games that has spread all over the world and across generations. We didn’t know anything about it except that it was scary and therefore fun… now that I’m older, I don’t think I want to know its history.
And a ’sorry’ goes out, yet again, to Josie. She was still really young at the time, and we used to bully her into doing the game knowing that it was too scary for her. What aweful sisters we were!
Anne of Green Gables was always a favorite growing up. I’ve seen it so many times it’s not worth trying to count. One scene I never understood (as a child) was when she forgets to put the cover on the plum pudding sauce and a mouse gets in it. Why did she tell them? She only got herself in trouble. It’s not like she left the drowned mouse in there, she took it out, so the rest was fine! Good to go, OK to eat….right? That’s what I thought.
I also remember once when my grandfather (Grampie Carter) wouldn’t let me put my spoon back in the drawer after I licked it clean. Not sure how old I was, but I remember the sink was a bit of a reach to get to. I was so mad, and convinced I was in the right. He had a hold of my hand and made me put it in the sink. What a waste.
So…who wants to come over to my house for dinner? Mmmmm…plum pudding…
So, I was making fun of my dog today, because she is overweight (you can make fun of pets for some reason and it’s funny, not cruel), and I found by self singing this little gem from my youth:
Fatty, Fatty, two by four,
Couldn’t get through the bathroom door,
So she did it on the floor,
Licked it up and did some more!
Yeah, gross, I know. It just popped in my head. And for some reason I associate this with the bathroom at my Grandfather’s old house. I remember looking at that particular door in amazement…some girl could really get stuck there and have to go on the floor?!. Hey, I was little. Probably early elementary school. Then I started remembering all sorts of jump-rope / clapping / counting rhymes. Funny how universal they are, stretching across borders, kids of the world learning how to make fun of people without even knowing it. Here are a few from the vault:
Fatty and Skinny got into bed, Fatty rolled over and Skinny was dead! (usually followed up by hysterical laughter).
My mother and your mother were hanging out clothes,
My mother punched your mother right in the nose,
What colour was the blood?
(this was used to determine who was ‘it’ in tag, who ever the word ‘blood’ fell on had to say a colour, the colour was then spelled out, and the person with the last letter was either ‘it’ or they were out of the counting and it was done again, which ever we felt like).
Then when we were done making fun of fat people and pitting our mothers against each other, we could always recite little racist rhymes handed down from god knows when:
Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!
We didn’t know what that meant (I still don’t), and didn’t know it was wrong to say. I do remember being scolded by an adult at some point though, so at least our parents knew better. Where did we learn that one I wonder… But, thank-god, not all the rhymes we knew were cruel and racist, some let you pretend to swear and curse without getting in trouble for it! Sweeeeet! Come on, ‘Miss Mary had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell…’, see if you can remember it right to the end (the ‘and that is all I know!’ line). If no one knows it I’ll be sure to follow this up in the comments.
Sorry Josie for pretending to be dead when you were little (Hey, Erin did it too). We would collapse on the living room floor (good thing we had soft shag carpet), and then lay there motionless, trying not to breath. This was sometimes accompanied by a horrific death scene straight out of a Monty Python movie. The hardest part was if you decided to keep your eyes open, because then you had to stare at one place and couldn’t blink when you were being watched. Sometimes it worked (and Josie got mad), sometimes it wouldn’t (you can only cry wolf so many times), and sometimes she would just play along so that she could pretend to be dead after us. What morbid kids we were.
I can’t remember how old I was, but I was still playing make-believe with the neighbourhood kids so it had to be elementary school, I’m guessing early elementary school…maybe grade 2 or 3, maybe earlier. Sometime around then there was talk of kidnappers…it might have been a TV show, or maybe something actually happened…I’m pretty sure it was the latter…a near miss kind of thing. Anyway, as kids we were on kidnapper red alert, and one of our favorite pastimes was to pretend that we were part of some kind of watch dog mission that sat in the ditch by the main road (it wasn’t really a ditch but it kind of was), and we would keep an eye out for suspicious looking black vans…because that’s what all kidnappers drove, big black vans with a sliding door so that they could easily scoop in an unsuspecting victim. Well, we took this role playing very seriously. It was our mission to protect the neighbourhood. I remember we were even looking out for the little ones (My little sister was never allowed to do a shift alone, for her own protection) . Sitting there in the grass, watching cars go by…eating mint leaves that weren’t really mint leaves but tasted like peppermint. We would never break character. Everything was real. It was all happening. At least until our mothers called us in for dinner. Ah….what good times….until my cousin came to visit. By that time our little game had escalated. We saw the kidnappers (and their vans) on a regular basis. We saw footprints, hands, guns…it was the gun that was the problem. One of us (it may have been me that started it, I don’t know) said that we saw a gun on the big flat rock on the edge of our yard, and that a hand reached up and grabbed it. Oh it was the news of the week. We were all talking about it. We had all seen it. And my cousin freaked out. She got mad at us when we swore it was all true, she ran back to the house and ratted us all out. And we all got in trouble. And we had to admit that we made it all up. And we weren’t allowed to play the game anymore. Not sure if we actually did or not. I think maybe we were bored of it by that time anyway. On to new adventures.
I can only remember being spanked once as a child…and it was for something that Erin did. Bugger.
Spanked on YouTube (courtesy of Earl)
When I was somewhere between 2 and 4 years of age, I had a goal to befriend my Grandfathers chickens. This was not an easy task. I’m pretty sure they hated me. I was fascinated with them. I’m sure if Grampie had a horse or something it would have been a different story, but he didn’t, so chickens it was.
I have fond memories of trying to pretend to be a chicken. I would go in the coop and try to blend in. I was pretty sure they bought into the idea. I remember squatting low and shimming through their little door that went into their caged area behind the coop (during the day they could roam free, but had the caged area otherwise to protect against fox and such). I’ve gone in that coop more recently and I am amazed that I was ever small enough to fit through that hole…especially without having to get on my belly…it’s pretty small, it was made for chickens after all. I would hang out with them in their little area, mostly I just remember staring at them and pretending to peck at the ground with my fingers as a beak. And I remember my coat was to puffy for squatting low for that long. When they were out in the open, the goal was to pet them. Not an easy feat with chickens. I only remember doing it once. And I remember being surprised at how soft they were.
I also remember when the chickens got killed. I was a bit older then. I remember trying to be OK with the situation, pretending I was mature enough for it not to bother me at all. I have no memory of it actually happening, so I’m pretty sure I ended up going inside the house. Or maybe it was so horrific that I’ve suppressed it. Maybe that’s why I don’t eat them, it all makes sense now.