The amount of downright stupid things one could do as a kid is just staggering. Walking down this memory lane I'm on, I'm reminded of the time when, after being thoroughly impressed with a cartoon I'd just watched - The Mysterious Cities of Gold - I decided to paint my right thumb gold. I had a mini can of gold paint for some reason, and I don't think I ever used it for any purpose than this bit of body painting. I tried - without success, I might add - to convince some of the neighbourhood kids that I had a 'gold finger' that could, if I wanted to, turn things into gold. Alas, to no avail. To top things off, when I got home and my mother saw what I'd done to my finger, she scrubbed it off and it hurt like hell, and then she grounded me.
As I go through these memories, there's a bit of me that's sort of transported to those times. Again, I wouldn't say that life was good there - as you'll soon see there were a bunch of very weird things that would happen - but there were certainly times that were just good enough. One of the most prevalent persons among those memories is my grandmother - she had a nursery / pre-school kind of thing when we lived there, and it was literally on the next door, in the very same building we lived in. Though my grandmother didn't live there, no - she lived in the city with my grandfather, who was becoming increasingly elderly - he was 67 already when I was born - and she drove back home every day to take care of him. As I remember it, my grandfather had mobility issues for a long time, and he couldn't just walk around unaided. But I spent a lot of time in my grandmother's nursery, what with living right next to it. Don't get me wrong, it was a delicate business first and foremost, so I could never be up to any sort of antics there. Strangely, though, there aren't very many memories I can conjure from that place : I remember one time just dying to go to the toilet, and as I wasn't being able to, you know, do anything, I started to panic - I legit thought I was going to die with a big poo inside of me. Then as I started to get up from the seat, well... it just slid down. Thankfully, into the bowl.
Now one other thing that I remember is my grandmother teaching me to read and write. It's one of those things where I'm not sure whether or not my memory is playing tricks on me, but I sort of remember being able to read my brother''s comic books before I started school. I still live with her now, it was a kind of family choice that I had to make a few years back - I had to serve as a buffer between her and my mother, and oh boy, things in that regard are pretty chaotic.
No comments:
Post a Comment