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.