Not quite a year ago I started a blog about my life, the struggles, victories, and in general, the things that I find to be amusing. My writing began with a brief history of my childhood, and it has developed into my current life as an adult who deals with Spinocerebellar Ataxia to the best of my ability. I make light of my current challenges and daily frustrations, and in the future, I am planning to stay with that theme, but from the very beginning, various people have commented about reading the views expressed from my childhood and how they had enjoyed them. In light of this thought, I decided to go back to my growing-up years and share with you all some more details surrounding that topic, in a three-part series. This will not directly reflect on my dealings with Ataxia, which I usually take head-on, but I am happy to give you more of the stories from my growing up years, and so now I would like to present to you:
Once, I Was A Child....Part 1.
The year was 1964 and, besides this vivid recollection, everything else was a blur for me until about the age when I started Kindergarten. This marked an event that will forever be burned into my memory because it was at this time that I began to experience a random forearm being thrown across my chest at forty-five miles per hour. This would happen whenever my parents would make a quick stop, and I was the one who was riding in the front seat of the family car. Honestly, I think I would have sustained less trauma to my little body if I would have been allowed instead to bounce my head off the dashboard or fly through the windshield. Sometimes I was lucky enough to be in the back seat, flopping around completely unencumbered, working off my last candy-induced spike of blood sugar, when the brakes were gently tapped, (all the way to the floor). Really, at these times, all that would happen was that I would get a strong whiff, and intimate knowledge of, the kind of material used to construct the front seats. Some of my favorite times as a kid happened in the family car.
From as far back as I can remember I have personally been in possession a sweet tooth. A working theory that I have is that from day one I was given a bottle of chocolate milk, either the kind straight from a carton or the Nestle Quik powered formula that comes in a can. That's got to be the reason why I go weak in the knees and feel utterly powerless when I find myself in the presence of dessert. Just a hint, slight aroma, or the mere suggestion that there may be a dessert, will start me hyperventilating and shaking. I also discovered at a young age that I have no willpower. After I have devoured the sixth cookie or second piece of cake, I will black out for a few moments.That's got to be it because when I regain consciousness, I discover that I've got another cookie, or third piece of cake, approaching my mouth and I have absolutely no recollection of how it got there. And, of course, I feel obligated to eat it. I mean, I've already touched it, and I don't want to look like I took it on purpose and then changed my mind. I would prefer if people don't form the opinion that I'm an indecisive person. I heard a crazy rumor one time as a kid that suggested that there was a link between sweets and obesity. Well! I thought that I might just have to field test that assumption and gather my own data. At present, I can tell you that the data is still coming in, but the evidence is spreading and stretching in favor of the rumor being true. Dang, it!
One of the phrases that I heard as a child and thought to be somewhat odd, was when my mother would say to me," Don't touch that, you don't know where it's been." I would always respond with," Oh yeah? We don't know where babies come from either, but that doesn't stop you from touching one every chance you get." Now, you understand that when I say that I always responded this way that the verbal comeback was all done in my head, right? I mean, I was kind of a daft kid, but I wasn't stupid. Looking back on the whole thing, I am now convinced that my parents had a plan to keep this information from me for as long as possible. I think that they were hoping they could somehow incorporate the baby thing into my twenty-first birthday party. They were saving the big reveal until then, and I'm not sure how it was all supposed to work. Was there going to be charts? Maybe graphs, or some pictures? I would have feigned shock and complete surprise, mumbling something like," I thought the belly button was somehow involved." Sorry Mom and Dad but my friends had already clued me in several weeks prior.
An entirely bittersweet event during my long and sorted career as a child was when my parents would decide to pack my brothers and me into the backseat of the family car and take us out for pizza. This was the sweet part of the memory, because, number one, we really liked pizza, and number two, because we also knew that on the way home after the meal we would be stopping at our favorite ice cream parlor for cones. And so, we would all pile into the car, drive an hour or so, inhale some pizza, (of which my mom was lucky to get any), and leave. Our next stop was the ice cream store, where we were allowed to purchase a double-scooped on a sugar cone. Of course, the cones were usually gone before we left the parking lot, even on occasion before my dad had a chance to pay. The sweet part of the evening was now over, and the bitter segment was now about to begin because the long drive provided my brothers with plenty of time to be creative and come up with new ways to make my life.....uh, interesting. With their stomachs full of pizza, and their veins flowing from the frozen sugar, they would begin to formulate new plans and plot my ultimate demise. But, honestly, I've got to say that the old standby was quite efficient and they eventually would always come back to it, so I knew what to expect in that regard and was just waiting for it. They always made sure I was on one of the ends of the backseat, by the door, and they would begin a rousing game of corners. They would violently and gleefully throw themselves to my side of the car like my dad was stunt driving on two wheels, successfully smashing me against the door. I stated that the game was called corners...corners, with an "s." This implies the use of both sides of the car, but I don't recall my dad doing any two-wheel driving on the other side. And I didn't know anything about machinery or car doors in those days,( this statement is in no way meant to be misleading because I still don" know anything about machinery and car doors ), but I was scared to death that the door would spring open under the weighty siege of their attacks. In my young mind, I could clearly see myself being sucked out of the door, never to be seen or heard from again. My brothers, I'm sure, would have calmly shut the door. Thirty minutes later, when my parents did a head count and wondered where I was, would have responded that a few miles back I had suddenly announced that I needed to stretch my legs and needed to get some fresh air, upon which I had opened the door and stepped out.
I was a pretty typical boy, forever being yelled at, and/or admonished for running with sharp objects. This was a situation where hindsight really was twenty-twenty. As a child, I never understood that saying. My parents used it frequently, and whenever they did I would always turn around and look behind me, but I never was able to catch a glimpse of whatever they were talking about. I think the first time that I might have begun to get an inkling as to what they meant by this was when I ran around our camp tent with a friend while playing Early-Settlers and Native Americans, (we didn't call it that then, but hindsight being what it is, and wanting to be politically correct....). I, of course, had a sharpened stick and was having way to much fun to think about the danger I was facing. Not only was I taking a chance that the stick could impale me like a hot dog being prepared for the campfire, but I was also ignoring my father. Stupidly thinking I was safe because he was busy setting up camp and would probably forget the whole thing once he smelled the meal that my mother was preparing. Well, I had too many odds stacked against me and ended up tripping over a tent peg, cutting the top of my head with the stick. I could have used a full understanding of the twenty-twenty principal BEFORE all the dumb stuff, but I imagine that that's how it is supposed to work.
Sometime around 1971, when my little brother was born, my parents got a new family vehicle, a Suburban. It gave us more room, which provided my older brothers with a better chance to build some excellent momentum before plastering me against the door. But on the positive side, Mom and Dad began to take us to the drive-in, because we could watch the first movie, which was usually a classic Disney movie like The Apple Dumpling Gang, and then spread out our sleeping bags in the back and go to sleep while they watched the second film. Back then, drive-in theaters were the main way of seeing a movie, and we had several large ones close to our house. I have another story that revolves around a drive-in, but it occurred when I was in High School, so, for now, I will leave that subject and come back to that in my next writing.
Every summer, from third grade on, I went away for a week to summer camp. The summer after fifth grade I was invited by a friend to attend the camp that he went to every summer. This was a new place for me, and I was looking forward to it. As soon as my friend and I arrived, I knew that I was really going to like this place and would be having a lot of fun. But the first night left me wondering if I had chosen well. I was in my sleeping bag and sound asleep,(a skill I had learned from an earlier age), when I began to have a dream that a bag was being held over my head. The dream became more violent, and as I struggled more and more, the bag was pressed harder. I was awake now and beginning to panic as I realized that this wasn't just a dream, that I was covered entirely by my sleeping bag, and there was a significant weight being pressed down upon me. Suddenly, and without warning, the pressure moved off me, and I was released. I threw open my bag, to find that every eye from every bunk was on me. And standing next to where I lay was our camp counselor looking very bewildered, and with an embarrassed expression on his face. Apparently, what had happened was that he had been dreaming that he had caught a baby bear in a sack, and the more I struggled, the more determined he became to keep it in the bag. Eventually, (only seconds that felt like minutes), the noise had awoken everyone in the cabin, which successfully awoke the counselor, who quickly realized his mistake and released me. But, besides being mistaken for wildlife, I loved the camp and went back every summer after that until I graduated from High School.
In the nineteen-seventy-four/seventy-five school year I was in fourth grade, and to the best of my recollection, this was when I began to catch faint wisps of a rumor. A rumor that at this point was somewhat elusive and vague, but that brought with it a chill in the air. It wasn't until the next school year when my older brothers entered High School that the strange tales and haunting stories of Freshman hazing became a reality. But I was only in the fifth grade and had other concerns. Besides, I still had a long stretch of four years, (which seemed like a lifetime in my young mind), before I needed to worry. This mindset worked flawlessly and carried me worry free until dinner time on the evening of my brothers first day of High School. The evening meal that night was filled with stories of the many hapless freshmen who were singled out of the herd to push a penny with their nose around a toilet seat. Tales were told, and pictures were painted in my mind of victims being lined up in bathroom stalls to become the receiver of the dreaded swirly. The basic idea behind the aptly named swirly, for those who may not know, is to have the toilet flushed while one's head is politely, and gently, introduced to the bowl and then held under water, causing the hair to "swirl" when the bowl is flushed. If the head is kept in place until the water has finished it's twirling and gone down the drain, the result is a twisted, wet hair-do. I have come close on several occasions, while bent over and cleaning the bowl at home, to falling forward and performing a self-administered swirly. This has happened when I have been engaged in a routine cleaning of the bowl, and trust me on this one, if I did immerse my head on accident, my arms would start to flail about in shock, and my hand WOULD find the handle, successfully giving myself a quickie hair wash. I have gotten myself into many seemingly impossible scenarios. But my High School years will be covered in part two of this series, titled: Once, I Was A Teenager.
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