Meme-ories Are Made Of This

Blame Minge.

What is the earliest memory you have as a child? Think far back.

My earliest memory is when my parents were moving from their first house, and into the house we lived at until I was 12. They had to go back to the old house to retrieve my sandbox once all the furniture had been moved, and the new owners were really nice to me. I suppose they probably thought that I was adorable, since I was only 2 years old. I don't remember ever living in that first house, but I remember moving. This fact that I can remember that far back has resulted in my being designated "the one with the good memory" within my family. Except when they think that I'm not remembering things right, in which case, and in spite of all evidence, I am declared a complete nitwit.

What is a special memory you have about someone? It could be a grandparent, family friend - not including your parents - that you knew as a child. What do you recall about them that makes the memory special?

My grandfather once paid what I thought was an obscene amount -- $6.00, if memory serves -- to get a library card once while I was staying with him and my grandmother one summer. They lived outside town, and had to pay to get the card. I was a little surprised that he didn't already have one. I ended up using it to borrow James & The Giant Peach for the umpteenth time -- my second grade teacher had read it to our class, and I became obsessed with reading and re-reading it. I dunno: I don't much cotton to "special memories".

What was a favourite game you played as a child?

Hide-and-go-seek in the dark. Our basement had no windows in it, so that meant that when you turned the lights off, it was just about as dark as you could possibly hope for. Plus, there were rooms and closets to hide in. The only time I ever played it seemed to be when my cousins were visiting, so that also might have something to do about why I enjoyed it so much: I always liked seeing my cousins. I was never particularly good at it, because, even then, I was the biggest and most uncoordinated of all of us. If I ever moved at all, to try to make a dash for "home base" -- the stairs upstairs, which, if you reached it, meant you were safe -- I was as good as caught. Not only that, but to this day I am incredibly prone to giggle fits when I get excited, so that meant that I would always be hunched over in the darkness, my hands clamped over my mouth, trying desperately to stifle my laughter, hoping that my brother or cousins would give away their position or get caught before my peals of laughter would erupt uncontrollably from beneath my fingers like the lava and ash from Krakatoa.

What was a memorable trip that you can recall being a little kid and what did you do that makes you think about it even now?

My family regularly drove out to Colorado to visit with my father's family in the summers. One summer, my brother and I flew out a week early, and my parents were going to drive out (in the Chevy Citation) and stay for a week themselves. The flight itself was memorable, because my brother kept on chanting "I WANT FOOD" and banging his little fists on the tray table. I was so freaking embarassed. But the stewardess did take us up to the cockpit to meet the pilot during a stop-over, which was neat.

The week progressed fairly dully: we were staying in my aunt's family's trailer up on a mountain, and it was sort of irritating. My family is theoretically Christian, but this family was the born-again, evangelical kind. The kind where being Christian is an active pursuit, rather than a state you are born into. I think at the time the father was actually a preacher in a church that was essentially a pre-fabricated aluminum building with dirt floors. These were people who named their children after characters in the Old Testament. (Eventually the entire family -- mom, dad, two kids -- went completely off the rails, started doing massive quantities of drugs, indulging in affairs with people they met on MySpace, declaring themselves Sovereign Citizens and not paying taxes, and getting involved with the mob. Seriously.) But the "holy roller" bit was completely new to me, and I did little to ingratiate myself to them by insisting that The Book of Revelations was one of my favorite pieces of science fiction. I entertained myself by reading Bobbsey Twin books, which my mom had bought me a stack of in anticipation of the vacation.

So, the day my parents get there, the adults decide to go out to eat. Fair enough: some of my favorite memories are of the times when my parents went out to eat without us. We had a babysitter and her sister from the trailer park taking care of us. Well, at some point while we were washing dishes, someone broke a plate. Hey, it happens. So we toss it in the garbage, nobody thinking too much of it. Then the sitter asks if I will take the garbage out to the dumpster. I think I was a little put out that I was expected to do chores, but I held my tongue. I'd just complain to my parents later, citing laws against child labor, or whatever.

So I'm dragging this gigantic bag of garbage through the gravel driveway of this trailer park, because this bag was enormous, and I could under no circumstances lift it off the ground. I was wearing flip-flops, because it was summer, and I have never been a fan of wearing actual shoes. Suddenly, I just topple to the ground. No, not topple: I just collapse. Crumple. Deflate, almost. As I was dragging the trash bag along the ground, the shards of plate had worked their way down into the bag. I have no idea how, but one of them cut through the bag, sliced through my skin, and severed my Achilles tendon.

You have no idea how freaky it is to look at the back of your foot, and see a yawning gouge, with blood pooling in the bottom of your foot. Not only that: something was it their. Something white and organic and horrible. I prayed at the time that it was a piece of Styrofoam that had been in the trash bag, but I knew it wasn't. I was looking at my retracted tendon.

As you may expect, I just started wailing. I don't remember the pain at all: you have to expect that I was just in complete shock. What I was crying about was that I was going to have to have stitches. Something about being sewn up was just so horrific, so Frankenstein. That was my big fear at that moment: stitches. I think that helped me, just not thinking about what the hell was happening.

As I was howling, an old man was on the porch of the trailer right in front of me. I say old, but keep in mind that 30 was old to me then. Just rocking, rocking, in his rocking chair. He never got up. I couldn't understand why he wouldn't get up, why he wouldn't help me. It seemed like hours, me sitting there, unable to stand, or move, for fear of major blood loss, and he was smiling at me. He was smiling. Never moving. It was like a fucking horror movie: for years afterward, that memory has haunted me. That face became the face of death to me.

Thankfully, the rest of the trailer park reacted to my screams. I remember that poor babysitter, assuring me that I probably wouldn't need stitches. Sure, it was a lie, but it was a good lie. People were trying to keep the blood from pouring with clean towels, and everybody was really nice. The sitter didn't have a car, but a man next door offered to drive me to the urgent care facility down the road: we were in the mountains, remember, and driving to the hospital would mean driving all the way into Colorado Springs.

Once I got there, I was sedated, or maybe I just passed out from shock, so time sort of got wonky. But it turned out that my aunt and uncle didn't leave a number with the sitter of where they would be, or even the name of the restaurant. This was pre-cell phone, and so parents always had these elaborate rituals to help the babysitters contact them if anything went wrong. So I was stuck for hours in a darkened room for hours, face down, waiting for my parents to show up and give any sort of clearance for treatment. When my parents finally did show up, they were told what bad parents they were for not leaving the info with the sitter, when it was my aunt and uncle's fault. My parents always left the information with their sitters, always left it written down, and would call if their plans changed. My parents were (and are) the good parents. Unfortunately, I was too out of it to mount a thorough defense. My mom still feels guilty for that.

Long story less long than it possibly could be: I ended up having to wear a cast, which meant that driving home in the Citation was a pain in the ass. They ended up having to put down the seats, and put all the luggage in a car-top luggage thing that they had to buy.

The scar has faded, and now I'm almost proud of it. Hey, Achilles never did recover from the wound to his heel!

Did you ever fall in love as a child?

No, but I tended to treat all my male friends like a jealous lover. I demanded to know where they had been, and who with. But I did get one of them to kiss me in Kindergarten.
I did, however, have a MASSIVE crush on John Schneider from The Dukes of Hazzard.