It being the 80's, it probably accounts for just how much leeway and freedom we kids got. I remember that I could just go out anywhere, pretty much anytime, and if asked, just say I was going for a walk, with rarely ever any questions asked. This town we lived in back then, it was a tiny thing. So tiny, it didn't even have a supermarket - we always had to go shopping somewhere else. But it had a very small theatre, which I dearly loved. They didn't play anything other than the likes of lower grade Cannon Group films, the likes of which made 'Missing in Action' look like a masterpiece, or teen coming of age erotic dramas like 'Lemon Popsicle'. Every movie they showed there was just awful, and I loved them for it. I loved the bags of sweet popcorn and other assorted bagged sweets you could get at the lobby. It was here I saw the 1980's Spider-Man movie, 'The Dragon's Challenge'. I was already familiar with the character from the comic books my older brother had and were lying around at home, and though I couldn't yet read, I'd be mesmerized by the pictures, the colours, the action. When we found there was a Spider-Man movie, and in our local theatre no less, we just had to go. To be fair, I haven't seen the movie ever since - I never felt that urge to donwload it or look for it online, but even as a kid I realized I was watching something that was really not that good - to put it mildly!
One of my favourite spots back then was this sort of triangulation station - a small-ish structure that was part of our Geodetic control network, and to get there I had to go some ways away from my house. I couldn't now tell you what that very young me found endearing in that particular place, maybe I felt some sort of peace, or maybe it was because I didn't yet know what its purpose was - I might've found it esoteric and was drawn to it because of those qualities.
It's a funny thing, because as things will be soon apparent, me and my family really didn't have a good time there, but in a way I did have a decent time there. Many of my days as a very young boy are still etched in my mind : the sunny saturday morning where I raced to the top of a street in order to buy a pack of stickers from a local shop, only to find it had just closed, and then running back down the street while, for some reason, looking back at something, only to crack my head on a lamp-post when I crashed into it. Blood running down my face, I cried my way to the caffee where my mother was sat having her coffee. Being the no nonsense woman I guess she always was, she took me home, cleaned the blood from off my face and slapped a band-aid in my forehead. Different times, huh?
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