Sundrip Journals
Every year Mama went to Switzerland to ski. One year she hit a tree and came back with a broken collar bone and shoulder. Later she developed laryngitis. She wasn’t able to move or speak for over a week. Mama silent and immobile….good times those were.
J of A
I went outside with my mother and sister and danced in the rain.
I remember getting up from my mother’s fit of rage, turning on the radio and dancing to 80’s music to toss out memory of what was just done.
I remember standing on a balcony 21 stories above the city gazing at a perfect rainbow with complete strangers. The rainbow seemed to hang forever.
I remember hanging out of a six story window looking down, not sure if the mother would really push me that time.
I remember sitting on a dock by the
I remember sailing with my uncle. My fear of water started there. I wondered if I could actually swim back to shore.
I remember standing at Pier 17 with friends laughing at this guys miniature tie. He caught my eye as he walked to the building. The man was gorgeous and well dressed. As he got closer I could see his tie was about 4 inches long instead of full size. We all laughed at such a silly style.
I remember kids making fun of me because I wore torque heals clear up into the 4th grade.(I was born with a club foot, it took awhile to correct.)
I remember where I was standing the day of the
I remember what it feels like to be shot.
I remember standing in the same spot hearing the country was at war to liberate
I remember the first thing I ever really stood for. I refused to buy Coke products and called Coke the official drink of Apartheid because they wouldn’t do the right thing and pull out of
I remember where I was standing just before I liberated myself from an abusive household.
I remember making my first loaf of bread at age eight. I had all the ingredients but one. I was sure it would turn out just fine. It turned out flat. That’s when I discovered yeast is important.
I remember making my first pan of fried chicken. I put flour on the chicken, put it in the pan and expected it to fry. There was no golden crust like at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I later realized water isn’t the same as oil. Age eight was a year for learning.
I remember climbing to the top of the house and jumping off the roof. I wasn’t playing Superman I thought I was the guy from the show The Greatest American Hero. While climbing I sang the song: “Believe it or not I’m walking on air. I never thought I could be so free-e-e. Flying away on a wing and prayer, who could it be? Believe it or not it’s just me.” Leap, crash, repeat.
I remember the first time I fell in love. He was a boy named Danny that I was sure to marry. His mother and my mother talked about how our little curly headed kids would terrorize the world. I was deeply in love at what age 10?
I remember the first time I had that funny feeling in my stomach while watching John Cougar Mellancamp dance on MTV singing with his guitar. I said, “Mama why does my stomach feel like all funny when I watch him dance?” “It’s excitement she said.” I was embarrassed. That was my sophomore year in high school.
I remember walking down the middle of a train tack in
I remember the first time I went fishing. I caught a baby sting ray. On a Pier in
I remember the first time I had escargots. My family went to Houlihan’s Restaurant regularly for Sunday Brunch. On a week day we decided to go to dinner. Everyone was to order something they’d never had before. I ordered escargots. My mother didn’t make me finish it. Thank goodness! I also remember the first time I had octopus. I like it.
I remember my first taste of alcohol. I had a
I remember sharing a pack of Marlboro reds with my adult next door neighbor in the sixth grade. This was long before menthol cigarettes came about. I’d like to take back the beginning of my smoking years. That started at age nine.
I remember my mother telling me she was going to get ice cream and she’d be back. She returned with coffee flavored ice cream. I cried like a baby. I had my heart set on real ice cream. I hated coffee. It would only take a few more years, until I turned 9, that I’d have coffee at the start and in the middle of each day.
I remember singing the Black National Anthem in the tub with my mother outside the restroom listening. She knocked on the door, came in and told me I did a beautiful job. That was the fourth grade.
I remember laying eyes on my new baby brother for the first time thinking, “That’s the ugliest raisin-like baby to pop out of a human being I’ve ever seen.” Now, you couldn’t convince me the ground he walks on isn’t blessed and paved with gold.
I remember watching my great-grandmother lay in the hospital, shriveled, gray, more frail than I’d ever seen her. We spoke briefly in her native tongue. It was the last time I saw her. She is the only person in my family that went from cruel to a changed woman.
I remember when my mother made a box of brownies and teased us kids saying they were nasty and the right thing to do would be for her to eat them all and save us kids from the horror of nasty food. She used to tease us like that. It was funny.
I remember the very first talent show I was in. I sang the song “Baby Face” and my first love’s mother and father sang “Ebony and Ivory.” I knew most in the audience. They never let me live it down. They were forever pinching my chubby cheeks telling me how sweet I was and how I had the “cutest little baby face.” My sister and my mother and I sang many Barbara Streisand songs, many, many show tunes and danced in countless talent shows. It was the wildest thing to see the crowd stand up and cheer. Sometimes we couldn’t hear the music they were cheering so loudly. One song we did with such a response was “She Works Hard For Her Money” by Donna Summer. My mother gathered several girlfriends and their daughters to dress as different professions. We did the entire video then the three of us (my mother, sister and myself) did a dance solo. Oh my gosh it was a blast.
There are many first, these are just a few.
Austin
Random Memory Friday: Firsts-Friday, December 14, 2007-12:14AM EST
At Wally World the other day it didn’t register WHY a man stood beside the door ringing a bell. I only noticed he danced around with his headphones on. I wondered what was on his ipod but other than that I didn’t think about the fact that he stood there because it’s the holiday season. He wanted donations for the United Way. I got that but still, I wasn’t thinking along the lines of the holidays. I don’t celebrate them so I suppose I see things differently. I have to remember that even if I don’t think in those terms many others do. I have to try and remind myself (via email notification) that many of my friends will be kind of busy with family and friends. I wouldn’t want to call on Wednesday or Thursday expecting a friendly chat only to find that I’ve interrupted their celebration.
Can someone really totally and completely forget the holiday right up until the day of or even past it? Think about this for a minute, say you’re driving a car. You get in, you put the keys in the ignition, you look both ways and you pull off. That’s what drivers do. But suppose you don’t drive. What do you do? You immediately walk around to the passenger’s side door. You don’t go for the driver’s seat at all. It’s unnatural to do so. You’ve never done it before. You go for the seat you know, the seat you’ve always taken. You might be wondering, but with that darned holiday music and the trees all over, commercials about the perfect gift you can’t possibly be that dulled to the holiday season. People that don’t drive see cars everyday. They see different makes and models. New ones come out at certain times. They may even appreciate one make and model over another but it doesn’t mean they’re in the same mind set as a driver. Toyota advertises it’s big sale. Honda tries to out sell Toyota. The advertisements are everywhere. But still, if you’ve never driven are you really paying that much attention to car advertisements? Advertisements or no, if you don’t drive you all but block out information about driving if it doesn’t pertain to you on a personal level. They come every year with the coloured eggs, fright masks and holly but since that information doesn’t pertain to me I do what comes naturally, I go for the passengers side door. It’s normal for me.
This brings me to feeling down or blue on holidays. Since I don’t celebrate them then it’s just another day for me. I have no real mood change due to holidays. I get up, I take my shower, I drink my coffee, I start my day. It’s routine. Holidays for me are the same as Toyota sales. I’m no happier the days leading up to the sale, the day of the sale nor the day after. I’m not “a driver” so my mind all but blocks out that information. My brain looks for information it can compute. I go for the passenger side.
Since I was a kid the holidays have snuck up on my family. There’s a standing joke that there’s an R & S Holiday Mistake. (The R is her maiden name and the S was her married name.) It’s no secret that my mother’s cooking could be counted as abuse. Since she didn’t want to eat her own coking we ate out a lot. When we ate out we ate well. No fast food, no happy meals or Red Lobster type stuff. We ate well UNLESS it was Christmas or Thanksgiving or Easter. Our regular spots were closed so our options were limited. To Denny’s we went. Since she forgot to go to the store (she was riding not driving) we ended up with no food in the house and nothing to eat every single solitary holiday growing up it was like that. So, every single solitary holiday we ended up at Denny’s. It became tradition for us. She’d swear she would remember next year but nope, she forgot and so did my sister and brother. It snuck up on us so there we were at Denny’s every holiday, every year. I have to wonder sometimes if she loathed the thought of having to cook some horrible meal she’d have to eat so that’s why she forgot to go to the store. Either way, we laughed at the dinner table at the worst restraint in the city. Ah, I hated that place. The food isn’t that great, the booths were sticky and back then they weren’t really that friendly to person of the darker persuasion. However, somehow we made that day laughable and fun. It was like any other meal though. There was no special thanks given, no special food to commemorate the day. It was another meal for us, another car ride we were not emotionally attached to. So, please don’t think this was our holiday meal. We ate and we went home and did what we always did.
I look back on that and laugh because it was like dang it we were suppose to remember. But we never did. I don’t think of that time as a bad time. I remember it fondly. To start calling it the R & S Holiday Mistake was just too funny. Many times there wasn’t a can of green beans in the house. The woman knew she couldn’t cook so why even try? That was quite the blessing, her taking us out instead of forcing us to eat her culinary disasters. I have a feeling one of the main reasons I cook every meal (if at all possible) is because I ate out so much as a child. I managed to break the tradition because of my love for cooking at home so this year and last year and the year before I did get into the passengers seat, so to speak, but I had a safety belt. I had food in the cupboard. No Denny’s for this girl. I’ll have something homemade, something warm and inviting just like yesterday and just like today, warm and inviting. Then on Tuesday I’ll get an email reminding me that Wednesday and Thursday I need to make room for other traffic.
Austin’s August
Tradition- Random Memory Friday
Friday, November 16, 2007-11:18PM EST
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