When I was a baby, the wallpaper in my room had forest animals. I have been told that the design I remember was only a horizontal stripe, not the whole wall, but I remember it as covering more space than that because I was so small and it was right at eye level from my crib.
This picture was actually taken long before I was born, and I never knew Lysander as a kitten, but it’s the only picture of him that I happen to have on my computer. He lived back in those olden days when cameras used film.
I was adopted at birth by Lysander, one of my parents’ three cats. Lysander was black with yellow eyes, larger than average, and had the voice and personality of a Siamese. He was so intelligent and so capable of communication with people that I was about eight years old before I even realized that cats were supposed to be inferior to people in any way. From the time when I was a baby, Lysander would watch over me at night. When I went to bed, he would come with me and lie down next to me. I would put my arm over him so that I would know he was there even with my eyes closed, and he would reach out and put a paw on my cheek. My mother thought that we were so adorable that one time, when my parents had friends over late at night, she brought them to look at me through the doorway when she thought I was asleep.
There were nights when I would wake up crying and my father would take me downstairs and sit on the sofa in the darkened living room and sing Hey Jude and American Pie until I fell asleep. I remember staring at the grandfather clock and wondering what a Chevy was and what a levy was.
I don’t very clearly remember our church in Chicago, but I do have very specific memories of looking around the congregation and noticing that whenever I made eye contact with someone, they smiled at me. And I wondered if all adults had a rule that when a child looks at them, they had to smile. At some point, I thought that those smiles were in response to me putting a coin in the offering plate, because that was the only part of the service that involved any participation, since I couldn’t read yet. Sometimes, I would accidentally drop the coin instead of getting it in the plate, and then when I would look around and people would smile at me anyway, I would feel a little guilty.
When we lived in Chicago, there was a large family who lived near us, and a couple of the older girls babysat us. I don’t remember any of their names or very much about them, except that we were very good friends with them. I think that they homeschooled, and that their influence was probably part of what led my parents to start homeschooling. We were pretty close to our neighbors across the street, too. I don’t remember anything about them except that I think they were an elderly couple, and that one time, when we were at their house, I licked their glass door because I thought that was the only way to clear condensation off of a glass surface. There was a woman from our church that was a very good friend of the family, and she frequently babysat us, either at our house or where she lived. My memories of her home are very jumbled and vague. I don’t even remember if it was a house or an apartment or some type of condo, because I think I recall that other people lived in the same building, but I remember the outside of the building as a regular house similar to ours. The only memories I have of her home that I know are accurate are the wooden ducks that she had. I was fascinated by the fact that the male duck had a green head and the female duck was tan. I think that she also had a lot of small glass decorations displayed on shelves right past her front door, and that there was a large stuffed lion or tiger or something like that.
There was a girl named Brittany in my dance class, and she sometimes came home with me and my sister. I was jealous of her because she had Disney princess underwear. My underwear was pretty cool, too; it had the days of the week, but at the age I was then, Disney princess underwear outranked days-of-the-week underwear.
Every morning, Lysander would tell me when to get up, and I would go to my parents’ room and say, “Is it morning yet?” And they would look at the clock and say, “Not for you.” I would then point out that Lysander had told me it was morning, before going back to my room to pet Lysander. I have no idea what time I usually got up back then, but it must have been pretty early, because I do remember that it was always still dark.
Look what I just found on Google images! Oh, the memories!
My mother taught me to read using a book called “Teach Your Child to Read in One Hundred Easy Lessons”, or something along those lines. It was a large paperback book with an off-white cover, although that cover had mostly fallen off long before the youngest of my siblings finished the book. Those lessons actually weren’t very easy at all, but they evidently were effective, because after I got through that book, I was always considered a good reader for my age. As frustrating as it was at the time, I have fond memories of that book, and I still remember a lot of the goofy stories that were at the end of each lesson.
I went through a phase where I was obsessed with manatees. It started when my grandmother gave me a manatee Beanie Baby, and I didn’t know what it was. I hadn’t realized there were animals that I didn’t know; it astonished me that the world was still full of those kinds of wonders and surprises even when I had already reached the mature and sophisticated age of four and a half years. As it happened, the world still had plenty of new animals I had never heard of, such as the duck-billed platypus and the sloth and various odd sea creatures and bizarre insects, but none of those revelations fascinated me quite as much as the discovery that there were things such as manatees. So manatees became my favorite animal, and I can’t remember exactly when or why I stopped being so interested by them.
In our front yard at the house in Iowa, there was a large maple tree. My mother took a picture of me hugging that tree the day we moved in. That tree really meant a lot to me and I don’t even remember why. (Incidentally, I happen to know from Google Earth that it has been cut down since we moved away from that house, which is really sad.) In our back yard, we had a tree that we later found out was a crabapple tree, but for the first few years we lived there, we didn’t know what it was. Most years, it didn’t produce any fruit at all, but it had beautiful flowers in the springtime. They usually only lasted for about a week.
Look what else I found on Google images! This was what my first Bible looked like.
One Sunday in church when I was about five, my mother handed me a hymnal and told me that I could follow along now that I could read. It actually took me a little while to figure out the format of the hymnal, but that was a pretty big deal to me to be old enough to use a hymnal in church. On Easter 1997, my parents gave me my own hymnal. It was the LW (Lutheran Worship) because that’s what our church used at the time, although I’m now much more familiar with both the TLH (The Lutheran Hymnal) and the LSB. (Lutheran Service Book) My favorite hymn was “Dear Christians One and All Rejoice”, and I kept a piece of paper on that page. It was pink, and it stained the edges of the hymnal. My first Bible was a Christmas gift; I don’t remember whether it was in 1996 or 1997. It eventually fell apart, and I was going to get rid of it after I got a new Bible in 2004, but I think the old one is actually still packed up in a box that got put in my parents’ garage when I left for college.
At one time, each of my siblings and I were limited to two sheets of scrap paper a day for coloring and writing. Later, we each were allowed to own a ream of colored paper. Mine was pink. We still were originally limited to two sheets a day, but that was still a major upgrade because the paper was double-sided and because colored paper is a lot more interesting than white paper. I wish I had kept more of the stories I wrote when I was little. I have memories of a story that overused the word “declare” because I was proud of myself for knowing what it meant, and a story where I didn’t allow myself to ever use a word twice consecutively, and a lot of stories where I started by introducing all of the characters and didn’t get much farther because that was the best part. As I wrote, I had a habit of letting each line slant downward as it approached the right-hand side of the page, and the slope of that diagonal would become steeper with each line. For that reason, every single page had a blank spot in the lower left corner. It was a major, life-changing event when I started using lined paper.
The television was downstairs, and we didn’t use it very much. There were occasional family movies on weekend afternoons, but those were special and unusual events. My father would sometimes watch television late at night, either alone or with my mother, but he usually didn’t start until after I was in bed. The sounds of the television would sometimes come up through the air conditioning vents, which bothered me because the sounds were distorted and sometimes sounded scary. Long before I ever saw Doctor Who, I knew it as something my father watched that had a very eerie theme song. We did watch sports sometimes. For a while, we were major Chicago Bulls fans. I don’t actually remember much about the game of basketball and I no longer enjoy it. I think that the main reason I liked it so much when I was little was that it was fun to watch television with my father, especially when there were pretzels involved.
There was a member of our church who worked for the local radio station. I don’t even remember his real name, because I always referred to him as Mr. Radio Station Man, which my parents thought was pretty funny. Once a week, on Friday mornings if I recall correctly, he played nothing but requests for a certain amount of time. My father called in a request every single week. Sometimes it was a song that had come up in conversation recently, sometimes it was a song that he had sung around the house that we had doubted was a real song, and sometimes it was just a song that we really liked. There were a number of songs that were major family favorites for a short amount of time, and most of us also liked anything by the Beatles. Mr. Radio Station Man liked the Beach Boys. There was a special event that occurred once a year on a Saturday in the summer. It was called Superbee Saturday because the radio station called itself “The Bee.” Beforehand, all of the radio station’s listeners would submit a vote for their five favorite songs. It had to have been a top 40 hit during a certain time period. (I don’t remember what that time period was, but all of the songs that won were oldies) The votes would be tallied, and on Superbee Saturday, the top 100 songs would be played in descending order over the course of the day. My father would turn on every radio in the house so that we could all listen no matter what we were doing.
In our town in Iowa, there were parades on a regular basis. The best part about parades was the high school marching band. We actually got to see and hear them even if there wasn’t a parade, because they would often pass right by our house when they were practicing. In the fall, there would be high school football games, and we would usually go a couple times a year. The marching band was the highlight of that, too, but it was also exciting to get to stay up late. And it was exciting to walk to the football field, which was only a couple blocks from our house, along with a crowd of other people, many of whom we knew. I was unaccustomed enough to sports events that to me, the crowd that gathered to watch a small-town highschool football game seemed like a multitude. I never understood the game at all and I never cared who won or lost, and it didn’t bother me at all that we always left before the game was over. It was fun just to be there. But it was also kind of fun when we were at home while a game was going on and could hear the sounds coming from the field.
Lysander’s birthday was on May 13, which was conveniently when the catnip was most plentiful. We had lots of catnip in our yard in Iowa, and it came back more profusely each year. By the time we moved, the catnip plants were growing to sizes that surpassed garden-store-catnip to such an extent that it was getting ridiculous. Of course, we brought catnip leaves inside for the cats on a regular basis throughout the spring, but Lysander’s birthday was the biggest catnip day of the year. We would use my plastic tea set to have a party for Lysander. For tea, we soaked catnip leaves in water. Lysander loved it.
For a few years, my mother would read books to us before bedtime. The American Girl books were the ones that I remember most clearly. I distinctly remember that we started with Kirsten, and that we read the third chapter of the first Kirsten book on Halloween one year. I also remember one night when my mother accidentally sat on Lysander’s tail while reading to us. I interrupted her to point that out, and she stood up and moved his tail out of the way and told him that he should have said something. He looked at her with confusion and annoyance that she had stopped reading.
Next door lived a couple who sat out on their porch very frequently. They had a ramp going up to the porch because the woman was in a wheelchair; I think I remember my father saying that she had had polio when she was young. They really enjoyed watching us play and talking to us, so we spent a lot of time sitting on their porch and chatting. One time, when they had some friends over, they made a point of telling my mother how sweet it was when I would sing while I was swinging, and I was really embarrassed and literally hid my face in my mother’s clothes.
Friday was pizza day, and for that reason, it was the best day of the week. My mother would go grocery shopping in the morning and would bring home frozen pizzas. They would go in the oven as soon as she got back. My father was always the one who cut them. The pieces were squares rather than wedges, so that there would be less pizza wasted if someone didn’t finish theirs. Nobody wanted the corners, because they were the smallest pieces.
I was a big fan of peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches when I was little, especially after I was old enough to make them myself. There were two different tuna casseroles that I really liked, too, and they were the first non-sandwich and non-dessert foods I learned to cook. Then there were tacos. We didn’t have tacos very often because it was a time-consuming meal to prepare, so when we did, it was a special treat. We always had two kinds of fillings: beef and chicken. The chicken filling was the one that I liked. It had almonds and pimento and sour cream. I didn’t know until I was older that the recipe my mother used for her taco fillings was not what most people think of when they think of tacos. When it came to side dishes, my favorite foods were fruit salads. My mother had two fruit salads that she made fairly frequently, both of which were pretty quick and simple. The one that I especially liked was cherry jubilee, or at least that’s what we called it, although I’ve been told that it wasn’t real cherry jubilee. It was made out of cherry pie filling, whipped cream, canned pineapple, and chopped walnuts. I know that now because I made it once or twice, but when I was little, I had no idea what was in it except cherries.
Every Wednesday morning, we went to the library. If the weather was nice, we would walk, because it was fairly nearby, and all but the last couple blocks of the trip were through residential neighborhoods. By the time I was ten or eleven, I was allowed to walk to the library by myself occasionally in addition to the family library trip on Wednesday. The library was a three-story brick building. The basement floor was used for children’s programs, the ground-level floor was the children’s section, and the top floor was the adult’s section. The children’s librarian was called Miss Liz. She had short dark hair and often wore a denim dress. There was a man with white hair and a white beard who spent a lot of time in the library; I don’t even know whether or not he officially worked there. He was an artist, and he painted the walls in one room with a garden scene full of various animals. It was fun to walk around that room and count all of the animals, and I didn’t necessarily get the same number each time. My mother let us each check out two books each week. At any given time, we had a certain favorite series, and would mostly check out books from that series, then spend all of Wednesday afternoon reading them. By the time I was about eight or nine, I liked to check out non-fiction books from upstairs. I recall that I frequently told people that, but added that I still checked out fiction from the children’s section because I didn’t like adult fiction. It took me years to figure out why people thought that was funny.
Next door to the library, there was a place called the Sanctuary because it had once been a church. I could be remembering incorrectly about either the name or the reason for the name, because I don’t really remember that place very clearly. I don’t even remember if that was its real name or just a popular nickname. We went there for milkshakes as a special treat every now and then. I think they served other foods, too, but I don’t remember ever actually eating anything besides milkshakes there. I don’t remember exactly what flavors they had, or which were my favorites. I do remember that my mother absolutely always got a hazelnut milkshake.
I mean, I can understand why other people might think this looks gross. I just don’t happen to think so.
We had a lot of cicadas, and we would find the skins that they had shed on trees and walls all over the neighborhood. Sometimes, we like to count them when we went on walks. I never thought they looked disgusting, and I didn’t have any qualms about touching them. For some reason, I only saw whole cicadas a couple times, and I was astonished at how big they were. I had imagined that they would look exactly like their skins.
My siblings and I used to play outside a lot. In the winter, we would play in the snow and roll giant snowballs because that was somehow much more fulfilling than building snowmen. Sometimes the snow plows would leave a pile of snow on the edge of our yard that was big enough for us to bring out the sleds. My brother would always be the last one in; when he got involved in a building project, he’d forget all about the cold. In the autumn, we would play in the leaves. My father would rake them into a big pile and we would all jump in them together. Of course, the swings were there all year round. We used to like to swing as high as we could and then jump off. There were a few severe bruises that resulted from that sport, but somehow it never caused any serious injuries.
Holidays were always a big deal in my family. For some holidays, like New Year’s and Valentine’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day, we didn’t have any specific traditions, but it was always necessary that we do something to celebrate. (Saint Patrick’s Day, of course, became a much bigger deal after my sisters started Irish Dance in 2006. But there never was a time when it went unobserved in my family.) Birthday celebration customs varied from year to year and from person to person, but they were extremely important. Then there was Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Christmas. I always saw Christmas as the big one. In fact, I had a tendency to get overwhelmingly excited about Christmas as early as mid-October. I was so impatient that, for a number of years, I had it in my head that it was bad to be excited about a holiday, and I tried to repress my anticipation. There were a couple years that I was actually proud of myself for not getting too extremely excited until Christmas actually was pretty close.
Making a wish list for my birthday or Christmas was a complicated process that took the good part of an afternoon. For reasons that I cannot explain, I made it a personal policy that I couldn’t send the exact same list to different people. For each relative, I had to make a unique list. They naturally contained more or less the same requested items, but the order was determined by a combination of how much I wanted the item, whether or not it was something I actually needed, how likely I thought that family member was to give it to me, and how many other family members were being asked for that particular item. I don’t actually know whether or not my family was aware that my wish lists were such carefully crafted masterpieces.
My brother and I tried to dig to China one time in the space under the clubhouse my father had built for us. Another time, we found particles of yellowish dirt under the swings, and decided that it was gold. A few years later, after my father had put leaves under the clubhouse, my sister and I discovered that there were lots of earthworms in those decaying leaves. We spent about a week digging around and collecting earthworms and carrying them around before my parents told us not to do that.
I had this set! I remember being so excited when I got it.
Paper dolls were one of my favorite and most long-lasting hobbies. My grandmother gave me my first few paper doll sets when I was very little, so little that my mother cut them out for me, and they usually didn’t last very long before getting thrown away. As I got older, though, it became very important to me to cut them out myself and to keep them permanently. The main thing that I did with them was beauty contests. My sister and I developed a game that entailed taking the children paper dolls from each set, lining them up in age order, splitting the line into pairs, and choosing the prettier paper doll from each pair. The pretty ones would then repeat that process over and over until only one doll was left, and that one was the winner. The contest would then start over in order to select the second place winner, and then the third, and so forth. Later, the beauty contests included all of the paper dolls, not just the children, and they were stacked rather than lined up, and they were in groups of three rather than in pairs. The entire contest could take weeks, and now that I think about it, it’s both a little strange and a little impressive that I would dedicate so much time to such a complexly regulated game when I was so little.
In the summer, we would take in some black swallowtail caterpillars that we found on my mother’s parsley and dill plants. We would keep them in a glass jar with cuttings of dill so that they could climb on the stems, and we would feed them parsley and watch them grow. We got to see first-hand how they transformed first into chrysalises and then into butterflies. Then we would set them loose, which was always kind of a bittersweet occasion. Usually, we had named them and had tried to keep track of which caterpillar was which, so we came to see them as pets.
Every year in the autumn, my father would record a Christmas tape to send to family and friends. It would include a lot of Christmas music recorded from his vinyl record collection and from other cassette tapes, it would include a few favorite songs of the family, and it would have medleys and other things he had thought of and taken the time to edit, usually humorous things. Sometimes, we would sing a song or two. The older Christmas tapes, from before I was born and from the first few years of my life, contained more references to current events and a good deal of current music. The ones that I like best are the ones from the first half of the 1990s, but I don’t actually remember when those were made. When I got a little older, I was a little more aware of what was going on in the recording process, even when it didn’t involve me, and it was exciting when the tape was finished and we got to listen to it.
My bedroom had a walk-in closet, and it was so large that we could even keep furniture in there. One of my sisters and I kept pretty much everything we owned in there, because we shared our room with two little sisters, and they frequently damaged our things. They got into the closet so frequently that my father eventually put a hook on the door so that we could keep them out. I spent a lot of time in that closet. It was a miniature playroom that I shared with only one sibling instead of all of them, and sometimes, I could use it as personal space just by myself. In the month of December, it became a workshop where my sister and I would take turns making little paper gifts to give family members, including cards, tiny handwritten books, and paper snowflakes.
My sister and I shared a biography about Paul McCartney that my parents had given us for Christmas one year. We argued over it so much that we eventually had to draw up a peace treaty concerning it. Essentially, the peace treaty said that we would take turns owning the book for a week. Whoever was not in possession of the book would keep the peace treaty, because it was understood that the peace treaty must be presented in order to compel one party to turn the book over to the other party. For this reason, that was an incredibly important document that was treated with as much care as the Paul McCartney book itself. It eventually came to pass that my sister forgot to bring the peace treaty to my attention and legally force me to give her the book, so I got to keep it for a while, until we eventually ended up keeping it on a shared bookshelf after all.
For a couple years, after my sister and I finished our math lesson each day, we would go downstairs to play with our Barbies and Kellies. Even after we no longer played with them every day, we would spend at least a couple afternoons a week with our dolls. Sometimes, they would explore castle ruins that we would build out of cardboard boxes, or sometimes they would stay at home and do schoolwork or have elaborate popularity contests that would be utterly ridiculous in real life. Other days, we would reorganize their houses, which were precarious stacks of cardboard and plastic boxes. My parents wished we would organize our toys in more space-efficient ways that weren’t in constant danger of being knocked down, but we couldn’t do that without mixing together the possessions of various dolls.
For a while, the Lees were the predominant characters. We each had a doll named Lee, and the Lees had more or less the same characteristics and talked in the same weird voice. Over time, the Lees decreased in significance and their roles were filled by Jane and Catherine, otherwise known as JAN! and Cafwin. Those two characters outlasted my doll-playing years; their tales lived on for many years through their diaries and through written D&D adventures. (Not only did our dolls play D&D, but our dolls’ D&D characters told long stories, and occasionally, the characters in those stories played D&D.)
Yes, we stuck with 2nd edition. The 2nd edition was cool.
I think I had been about ten when my father taught me, my sister, and my brother to play D&D. I played a chaotic neutral thief named Jacqueline. She was constantly endangering the mission by running after treasure, so everyone else simultaneously hated her and thought she was hilariously funny. We normally played on Friday evenings. I remember certain scenes of our adventures as clearly as if I had seen them in real life or on a TV screen. There was the fight with the giant boar that nearly killed my brother’s fighter at the very beginning of our first adventure, there was the time that my thief ran away from the group to search a fortress for a hidden treasure by herself, there was the battle with the giant that we won because of my sister’s mage’s blindness spell. There was a beholder and dwarves named after the children in The Sound of Music and mermaids who were weresharks.
For a while, we would play with legos every Sunday afternoon. I don’t actually remember how many of us were involved in that. It’s possible that I even did it by myself sometimes. At that time, we were going through our Phantom of the Opera phase, and so we would generally call our structure the Paris Opera House and name the lego people after Phantom of the Opera characters. The actual storyline of our playing rarely had anything to do with the Phantom of the Opera, except that the mirror in Christine’s dressing room always played an important role. Before the legos were our favorite toy, we used to play with duplos. (In case anyone isn’t familiar with those, they’re made by the Lego company and are basically just larger lego blocks.) Our favorite game to play with the duplos had something to do with the underground railroad. At one point before that, I think we used to play zoo with those blocks, because that’s apparently what the set was originally supposed to be. We had a lot of zoo animals, and there was a train that they rode. Sometimes, when we weren’t playing with the duplos, my father would take all of the blocks and build a pyramid.
In the summer, we went to the pool several times a week. Normally, we went in the evenings. There were various reasons for that, but I think the original reason was that the pool was significantly less crowded late in the day. Also, we were less likely to get sunburned. After we moved, our new swimming pool was much farther away from our new home than we were accustomed to, and it was a giant water park instead of the comparatively small kind of pool we were used to, but we still kept our old swimming pool schedule. I spent so much of my childhood summertime going swimming that I there are a lot of books, foods, and computer games that make me think of the pool.
At one point when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I invented a game that was basically a fantasy dance school. I would make up charts listing all the students, class schedules, cast lists, recital programs, and all sorts of fictional records. I started over with a new fictional dance school several times, but there were certain details that we always the same. It’s a little ironic that I actually started doing that back when I was still taking dance classes only once a week myself, and I think that’s part of the reason that I had to start over a few times; I felt a need to keep it somewhat realistic. I remember days when I spent hours of my free time on my “dance class thing” before going to my actual real dance class, just to do the exact same thing the next day and the next and the next. Somehow, even when I had hundreds of fictional dance students, I could remember details about all of them. I thought of them as characters in an epic tale, even though they were actually just names accompanied by a line of coded statistics that represented plot points of a story that had never been written in words.
Two of my sisters and I started recording CDs together in February 2008. At first, we made a CD about once a month, and each one took less than a day to make. They were basically themed playlists with a couple tracks of talking. We would have to script the talking, record it with background music, choose the songs, decide on an order, save each song onto the computer, and burn it. Our first medley was on a CD we made in May 2008, and it was pretty low quality, but we were proud of it. By the end of that summer, our standard for the quality of our recording was a lot higher, and we eventually started making CDs a lot more frequently and spending a lot more time on them. At any given time, we were in the process of making our next CD, and the computer always had a file full of works in progress. Over the course of a year and a half, we made 30 CDs. There were a few in there that weren’t particularly good, but overall, we were pretty proud of those CDs, and there was a lot of stuff on them that was funny, clever, and well-edited. I still listen to those CDs every now and then.
My cat Romana has beautiful eyes. If I had to describe them as being a certain color, I’d call them yellow, but they’re actually multi-colored and the shades vary. Sometimes they’re greenish blue near the pupil, then gradually range to greenish yellow, and finally yellow at the outside edge of the iris. Other times, they’re completely yellow, but the center is vaguely greenish and the outer part is orangish. They’re very fascinating eyeballs. And they make me wonder, why don’t cats have the same eye colors as humans? Why is it possible for cats’ eyes to change colors so much more drastically than humans do? And why does Romana have multiple eye colors?
kaleidoscope49 