Tag: growing up

The Formative Years: Pt. 3

Welcome back.  We made it through another week in these uncertain times.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into that.  That topic’s been run into the ground on every social media and news outlet in the world.  I know I originally said it would only be two parts, but I keep coming up with stuff to talk about.  If you remember, last week I spent a lot of time talking about some of the fonder memories with me and my cousin.  Today we do something different.

It’s time for school.  I think I mentioned before that we only lived a block away from the elementary school in Redgranite.  In those days, it was normal for kids my age to walk to school by themselves.  For sure not out of the ordinary.  Mom would usually watch as I crossed Highway 21, but once I was passed that, I was pretty much on my own.  Our school building at the time was very old.  It had been the high school back in the days when the town was bigger.  It was actually built in the 1800s.  It has since been torn down and a new modern style school has taken its place.  Not going to lie, I was pretty sad the first time I went there and saw that it was gone.  I stopped in front of the empty lot in my car for a while and reflected on the memories I had.

I don’t remember much of first grade as it was mostly spent getting to know everyone.  I do remember coming home and telling my Mom about the girls in class and which ones were going to be my girlfriends.  Ya, I was a six-year-old player.  But much like my later years in life with women, none of those plans came to fruition.  I think I just heard a collective “awwww.”  Don’t feel bad for me.  There were a lot of bullets dodged by those plans not working out.

Second grade was a big one.  I turned eight in February that year, and in March, my sister gave birth to her first child.  I was the only uncle in my second-grade class.  I asked her, and she agreed for some reason, to bring him into my school so I could use him for my show-and-tell one week.  He was a hit, even though many kids were confused because their uncles were “really old.”  Granted, back then we thought sixth graders were “really old.”  This was also my “dinosaur” phase.  If you’ve had kids, especially boys, I’m guessing they all had a dinosaur phase.  Every picture I drew, every report I did, every book I read, dinosaurs.

Third grade was one of my favorite years.  I had a great teacher, who’s name escapes me because I absolutely suck at remember people’s names.  Math, which was my favorite subject at the time, got a little more challenging.  We learned a few basic Spanish words like gato, roja, and verde.  These come in handy when Spanish speaking people are looking for their cat or you want to know what color the salsa is.  I was put into a gifted program for a while to do even more advanced math because I had picked up on everything so quickly.  This ended when I realized none of my friends were in there with me.  I sort of sabotaged the situation until I went back into general population.  I was also reading a lot more and loved it.  I feel bad because that has changed as I’ve gotten older.  I may need to reunite with books soon and try to reignite that flame.

My dinosaur mania switched to cars.  We started going to Jefferson and Iola.  Dad would take me to just about any car show in the area and I would study the differences between the years.  The headlights, taillights, roof lines, grills, bumpers, and anything else that distinguished them.  It started with Mustangs because my dad loved them.  I always struggled with the ’64 ½-’66 but could nail everything after that up to the ’74.  Then it went to Corvettes and I’ve kind of been obsessed with trying to know the year, make, and model of just about every older car I see ever since.

I think fourth grade is when a long-term crush on a girl in my class started.  Of course, I never had the guts to say anything to her, and we moved before we were at the boys and girls “hanging out” stage of our lives, so that never happened.  It’s also the year that I became really close friends with who turned out to be my best friend for the last three years I was there. 

He lived in that subdivision that I had mentioned my Dad and Uncle developing outside of town.  He had an Atari, I had a ColecoVision.  I had my little Kawasaki; he had a Honda ATC three-wheeler.  We got along great.  His back yard was woods.  We’d be outside all day together just doing kid stuff.  Climbing trees, building forts, and avoiding his jerk of a brother.  We’d race our bicycles around the block of the subdivision.  The road was all loose gravel, so that sometimes didn’t end well and in one case required a trip for some stitches in his hand.  His Dad did taxidermy, so it was always fun to go into his shop and look at the mounts he had on the walls.  Deer, elk, a moose, a string of bluegill, a sturgeon, and he even had a full black bear standing on his hind legs in the corner. 

Fifth grade was when art and music started to pick up and we got to do more stuff there.  I think that was when the recorder made its evil presence known, and my personal favorite at the time, the autoharp.  I liked it because it was kind of like a guitar laying down.  Or at least that’s what I told myself back then.

In most places, sixth grade means moving up to middle school, but in Redgranite, it was your last year before being bussed to Wautoma.  I don’t know why they did that as I think the Wautoma kids started middle school in sixth.  I guess we just weren’t mature enough to roll with those big city kids.  Sixth grade could almost get an entire post to itself, but I’m going to boil it down to just a few high points.  This was my introduction to personal computers.  We got ourselves a Tandy TRS-80 computer in the classroom.  I was drawn to it like a magnet.  It had some educational games for it that took a while to load.  I believe they were math based, so of course I was all over that.  We didn’t get a lot of time to play around with it at the time because most people just looked at personal computers as simple toys at the time.  If only we’d known.

Do you remember being asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”  Well, we got an assignment to do a report on that and explain why.  People in my class did the usual, Doctor, Nurse, Veterinarian, Policeman, Fireman, Astronaut, Farmer, or whatever their parents did for a living.  Then here’s Bart over in the corner of the room putting the finishing touches on a picture of his future-self jumping a big pile of dirt on his green Kawasaki dirt bike as he wins the Motocross Championship.  I always liked to add an illustration to my reports for that little something extra.

Sixth grade was also the start of band.  I loved music, so I was all in for band.  However, being the small unwanted stepchild of Wautoma, their kids got first pick of instruments.  When it got to us, all that was left for us to choose from was French Horn, Clarinet, Oboe, Flute, Piccolo, and I think Bassoon.  No drums, no guitar, no sax, and no keyboards.  Well, I had agreed to do it already, and my Mom played the clarinet in high school and still had her extremely nice 1950s instrument, so I played the Clarinet.  For that one year only.  I’ll speak more on this when I get to Ripon.

Of course, I must mention the dreaded broken chair incident of 1983.  One of my favorite female classmates had a chair that was different than pretty much every other chair in the room.  We all had that thin flat plywood type seat with the curve at the front for your knees to wrap around.  She had an older chair that had a thicker solid wood seat with a sort of butt indentation in it.  Well, during an especially heated round of musical chairs, (probably to see who was first in line at lunch, and this guy loves him some lunch) I made a move to sit rather aggressively on her chair and broke the seat right down the middle.  Now, I felt a little bad at the time, and she could have just gotten a different chair, but instead she kept it so she could remind me of how I had wronged her the rest of the year.  At least I’m pretty sure that’s why she did it.

That’s going to be it for elementary school.  Maybe one more post next week to finish out general life in town and we’ll move on to teen years in Ripon.  Got a lot to talk about there too.  I hope you enjoy my stories as much as I enjoy writing them down.  It’s very therapeutic for me and I thank you for sharing in this with me.

Until next time, we’re all in this together.  Luv luv.

Who Says You Can’t Go Home

Throughout my life, when I’ve been asked where I was born, and I responded with “Hartford,” more than half the responses were, “Connecticut?”  Hartford, although the largest city I’ve ever lived in, is considered a small community. Back when I lived there, it was just under 9,000 people and is currently around 15,000 strong.

Although I was only six when we moved, many bits and pieces of the memories I have are pretty clear. I’m sure some aren’t totally accurate as your mind has a tendency to fill in the blanks when you forget things from long ago. But I’m going to tell you about them as if they were gospel. It’s my blog, I do what I want.

Right now, you are saying, “how does this tie in with your title?” Well, stop being so impatient. I’ll tell you.  Recently I took a motorcycle ride and ended up in ‘my hometown’. (Queue Bruce Springsteen) You expect there to be changes when you return to places from your youth, especially thirty-six years later. Being that young, I didn’t go downtown often, so I don’t have any memories of main street. But when I got to my neighborhood, nothing looked the same.  Our house was completely different. The big side yard had another house in it. Our big back yard now had a big garage in it. I thought the end of the street was the alley, but I found out from my siblings that the road carried past that by at least two more houses.

The big hill I used to push my big wheel up and then stand on it while I rode it down, barely looks like an incline now. I remember my best friend, Davey, lived across the street, but I have no idea which house was his. None of them look familiar. There’s still a car wash behind the old house, but it looks nothing like I remember. I don’t think our old church is a church anymore. When I rode past, it looked like there was a mannequin dressed in 80s female concert goer gear out front. Thrift store maybe, or just some strange event going on.

Although a little saddened because things weren’t exactly how my mind remembered them more than thirty years later, I began remembering fun times (and not so fun times) that still made me smile.  I rode around some more and saw an alley that I’m pretty sure my brother’s friend lived on. He had a Saint Bernard that I got to ride like a horse. Rode past the mill pond where my brothers would take me to go frog hunting. We’d bring them home and Dad had to cook them because Mom said they looked like little baby butts so she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

There were also lessons learned. I remembered my middle brother pushing me on my pedal tractor as fast as he could run, then losing control of said tractor which netted me a lovely smiley face scar on my knee. What lesson did I learn you ask? Was it to hold on tighter to the steering wheel of my tractor? Nope, the lesson is, “it’s all my brother’s fault.”  I remembered walking outside and seeing the same brother and our cousin looking in the trunk of a car. I walked up and wanted to see what they were looking at. Not seeing me come up behind them, my cousin closed the trunk on my head. You guessed it, my first head scar. Six stitches I believe. What was the lesson here? To make sure people know you are around them before sticking your head in a trunk? Nope, somehow that was my brother’s fault too. Trust me, everything was his fault back then.

There were some lessons learned through observation as well in my youth. The large tree in our front yard grew at a bit of an angle. Not like a 45, but not a full 90 either. I witnessed my older brother try to ride the middle brother’s bike up said tree. I don’t think he got the desired result. Lesson learned: when trying a stunt that may wreck a bicycle, never use your own bicycle. I watched my brothers play catch with a metal tipped dart. How you say? There was a piece of round metal ductwork pipe hanging from the ceiling in the basement. They each had a piece of wood. One would throw the dart through the pipe, and the other would catch the dart with the piece of wood. This was fun to watch, until one of them caught the dart with the hand that was holding the board. Then it went from fun to funny…. because it wasn’t me. Lesson learned: don’t play darts with my brothers.

As my ride to the next stop continued, I started thinking of those trips “up North” we took in the summer to go stay at my Aunt and Uncle’s land. Riding minibikes and sleeping in the pop-up. Riding up there “in the way back” of the station wagon. Good times, but still, lessons learned. Lessons like deep soft sand is hard to ride a minibike through, you can only hold your shoe on an exhaust pipe for so long before you foot starts to get hot, people who don’t swim so good should not follow their much taller sibling out into the lake, marshmallows taste better brown than black (again, my blog, my opinion….but I’m right), and of course, bed wetters should not sleep on the table made into a bed if you ever plan to eat on that table again. Feel free to ask my therapist about that last one.

What does all this mean? What can I take away from all this? What does it mean that you can’t go home?

The general consensus is that “you can’t go home” refers to things physically changing over the years. Going back to your hometown, you won’t recognize it anymore because everything will have changed and evolved over the years. Time doesn’t stop.

I tend to see this a little different, because, well, I’m a little different.  Can you physically go home? Yes, of course you can. What you can’t do is change anything that happened there in the past. You can remember as much as you can possibly remember from your past, but you can’t change it. The past is set in stone. You can only learn from your past. Try to repeat the good if you can. Try to do similar activities to what you remember fondly. Try to learn from past mistakes and not repeat them, over and over and over…….  

I went home. It wasn’t what I remembered, but it triggered so much more. It triggered smiles and happy memories of a simpler time in my life. A time of virtually no responsibilities. No concept of time. No stress or anxiety. And of many lessons learned.

Thanks for taking the time to give this a read. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe took a little something away. Or it at least put a smile on your face. We all need that these days.

We’re all in this together. Luv Luv.