Shared Lies. A Reflection of Profundity.

please don’t have a mental breakdown.

Is that all you’ve got?

Ring, ring. Report coming in from…

CPR given, thread will continue on until all regurgitate profusely. Projectile vomiting encouraged.

Being a creature of whim cannot be denied. Her dreams, if you are so lucky to be in them, take you places, adventurous places where she, the tomboy, runs wild.

Aside: Had the pleasure of dining with two childhood friends in my mid-twenties, a meal I’ll always savor in which I was honored with their praise for bringing the exciting times to their childhoods. A compliment that I’ll never forget.

This all seems a little gay.

Gay happiness, imagine that?

At 3, my first boyfriend was a neighbor, David, also 3. Our best time was escaping supervision and running off into the six feet high stalks of corn, deep into the field beyond our apartment complex. My Grandfather was like The Incredible Hulk when he finally found us after his lengthy, panicked search.

A blond hippie named Zak turned my head next at 4. I was completely smitten. :laughing: Somewhere there’s a photograph of the two of us together looking very sophisticated. I didn’t even fight wearing the dress.

Now Robbie, who was 8, literally tackled me to steal a kiss from my 1st grade lips. This was a match that he won fair and square. He chased me down over the course of a block and wrapped his arms around my legs, successfully dragging me down into the plush grass to my Mother’s horror from behind the back screen door. She charged out to drag him off of me. A few hours later the doorbell rang, repeatedly. There stood Robbie with the neighbor’s plucked flowers in hand and he apologized to my Mom and I.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18c_02ay4Yo[/youtube]

Barbara Streisand-Memories The Way We Were

Ah, school days began with pre-school at 4 yrs. old and included kindergarten. There, I learned to make butter and petted many exotic animals. Naptimes were problematic though as they had always been. The kicker was that coins were acquired under one’s cot by sleeping, coins that would allow for the purchase of treats. I was a terrible actress, my fluttering eyelids gave me away every day. Hence, I became accustomed to frugality early on.

The playground there was magnificent. The swinging gate and the mock pirate ship with the trap door were imagination inciters. The ship was elevated on heavy duty springs which allowed for it to rock and roll. The delights didn’t end with the equipment but continued past the windows of a nursing home. Visiting with the smiles of all the Grandmas and Grandpas was the greatest!

I didn’t attend the “big kids school” until I was in 1st grade. What smells and sounds, not forgotten yet. Raggedy Ann’s tin smile greeted me every morning where one of two entrees would await my lack of surprise at noon, pimped out metal lunchboxes were all the rage. Those lunchboxes reeked of peanut butter and grape jam sandwiches and Spaghetti O’s with meatballs, but on the flip side, school furnished chocolate milk was always on the menu.

About 28 students to each first grade classroom and being that I had not attended kindergarten at that school, I was placed in the slow class. Isn’t it awful that children are privy to such knowledge so early on? Perhaps my ears were quickened while I twiddled my thumbs throughout the first semester of that year. After the second semester transfer up the ladder in rank, I didn’t notice anything more challenging. Come to think of it, I learned nothing for two years at that school, other than how to create a bad-assed haunted house put on by the 7th and 8th graders. They floored me! Walking that horrifying maze up and down three flights through mysterious parts of the school yet unseen is burned into my mind.

During my second grade year, my parents built their first home in which they did a lot of the finishing work. The subdivision was growing at a steady rate. Our house was the second to be built on that side of the street, set back in a court. Long hours my parents worked to build the deck and the cement patio, not to mention an entire summer of staining this and that, installing carpet throughout, and designing the basement, family room with those damn 1970’s mirrors up the yin-yang. They were a hazard, an optical illusion that many people walked right smack into.

Okay, my neighborhood was sparse and lonely for six months, but by the time third grade began a few friends moved into the court behind us on the other side of our block. The best place to grow up is in a neighborhood under construction which borders the edge of a city! One mile in one direction, your in the cities’ new growth of businesses, shopping malls, entertainment with super highway access. A quarter of a mile in the opposite direction timber and fields, totally wild and untouched. For us kids, unlimited construction supplies to be confiscated for the ultimate forts and other projects. What a playground of flooded basement pools and rafters as jungle gyms. There was one good sized lot that would stay flooded named ‘The Pond.’ Then there were “The Tracks” at the bottom of a steep cliff where hobos camped and hitched rides on the rails but to get down there you had to pass “The Big Rock”, a ginormous (that’s gigantic and enormous) boulder and over “The Big Hill” onto a wooded trail that winded down the cliff.

Addendum: Somewhere I recanted some of our neighborhood escapades in a screenplay format. I only let one other person read it and he chuckled enough that I was satisfied. Maybe it will turn up and I’ll torture you all with it! My evil plans are in full swing.

So third grade approaches, but a glitch arises in my parents’ plans, come to find out that the school district, the city one, stopped at the mouth of our court. Our house sat all the way inwards. At the time my Mother was an English/Music teacher at a gifted, exceptionally gifted, school in the city where her sights were set for my attendance. Tirades towards the contractor ensued. My parents felt duped. Then the question became, where was our daughter to be going to school?

(Sorry Mom for my grammar, word choices, etc., etc.)

Twenty miles outside the city in a sleepy, little, one horse town.

(It’s so funny now! :laughing: It was probably for the best that my Mother and I didn’t butt heads in a shared building throughout my earlier education.)

Once a very long time ago in a land far from the city, an average, eight years old girl attended her first day in third grade at a magical new school. To be the new girl has its’ pluses and minuses. Akin the the Doors song “People Are Strange,” there were many unfamiliar stares and inaudible whispers, but the excited, female child tuned into her new surroundings and claimed her stake in this distant kingdom hailed as Pleasant Grove, or something pleasant.

I peaked as a child. The adult realm pales in comparison and to see today’s children pulled into the adult realm through disregard for the prize that is childhood is saddening. Innocence is gone in the blink of an eye now. It’s probably just as well that most children have little if any recollection of their formative years, a godsend so to speak.

…made to grow up far too fast these days… just look at Willow and Jaden Smith. They don’t know what or who they are yet they have been forced to concern themselves with adult things from their pre-teens.

Lori was my bestest, yes, bestest friend and we found laughter easily, giggly girls every day. The days when a shared look grew to thunderous belly laughs. During times like those, I always had to cross my legs and sit down or create a yellow puddle somewhere public. That was joyous laughter, not on occasion, but all the time. Without adult worries and fears, joy simply blossomed.

Pan was the first God I ever called on, pined for. Peter Pan, that is. What we could have built together in Neverland. My name was not Wendy Darling, but I embodied her spirit. Hmmm, she was my first heroine. That’s never occurred to me before. Interesting tapping the young self.

Wendy Darling’s spirit of nurturing all the Lost Boys ignited my desire to adopt many, many children someday. There was also a documentary about an MD and his wife who adopted 17 kids at least and had a few of their own as well. Most of the kids came from other countries, had special needs, and some were missing limbs from wars or birth defects. This couple embraced these orphans with such warmth, such specific care for each child that all the kids were flourishing. I was so moved that I cried with joy, my tender heart was touched forever, kept tender forever.

As my neighborhood became inhabited by more and more families with kids, our gang grew. Our gang was modeled closely after The Little Rascals. Kids abandoned their home life, the adult world, when they stepped outdoors and we met in a world of our own making which always kept us entertained.

One of our favorite invented games was played in a relatively empty, double-sized garage where the garage doors were closed with all of us kids inside, usually six to eight of us. It was our version of baseball. We’d divide into two teams. The batting team wore roller skates, the pitching team did not. The object of the game was to whack a small, wiffle ball with its hollow, plastic bat with such force that the ball would ricochet like crazy against the walls of the garage. Once the ball was in crazy motion, the batter on skates would circle to touch three bases along the walls and try to arrive back at home base without being hit by the ball. If you were hit by the ball in any way, even by the ricochet, you were out. Three outs and the teams traded places. Absolutely wonderful chaos! Many great times were had and I don’t remember any of us ever being injured.

Hello again. :smiley:

Have I said that I had the greatest childhood ever enough, not thinking so? I was so, so fortunate.

Can you remember the smell of the water in the Pirates of The Caribbean ride at Disney World? That chill of excitement in the air? The Animatronic figures were impressive during the 70’s, singing and dancing “Yo, ho, ho!” And the Haunted Mansion which started out real scary then became bizarre with cartoons depicted on the walls, but the ballroom of ghosts dancing was magnificent. I’d enjoy seeing that again. The Swiss Family Robinson treehouse was to die for and brought about thoughts of absconding from the rest of the vacation to hang out there forever. Other kids, knowing that I’d refused to go home, would have joined me for a miniature movement of youngsters against aging. Lol.

Once I was made an honorary pilot, given my golden wings even by the active Captain, on Continental Airlines when flying in comfort didn’t require fifteen extra charges. In the past, flying was a welcomed adventure, now it is a torture sentence, anywhere from two to sixteen hours of counting down the seconds to an escape.

Ah, the '70s, does anyone remember Dorothy Hamill and her famous hairstyle, the Hamill Camel? Boy, was I ever excited to sport her look. No more crying sessions with my Mother brutally forcing my hair into pigtails. Shorter hair just suits me, frees me. Even now, it weighs me down when it hangs shoulder length or longer. Still a tomboy over here I guess. Many women and even some men hide behind their hair as if it gives them sort of a not-so-invisible superpower, wear it like a security blanket of their true attractiveness and without it they are always self-consciously feeling vulnerable.

I have relatives who have worn their thick heads of hair so long, well below their buttocks, that the tension caused by gravity caused them to suffer non-stop headaches.