Do you have a very random childhood memory to share?

I remember when photo albums were real things that you could leaf through and touch. I use to do that with my grandmother every week and listen to stories about everyone, who they were and what they did, etc...

 

My random childhood memory was my folks telling me that freedom of speech was enshrined in the Constitution ... seems they were wrong.

 

oh yes, we played Indians and Indians, made our own bows & arrows. My brother was hiding in the bush and took an arrow at a weird angel. Lucky he did put lose an eye, it went in the bottom lid and skimmed the tear duct. When he would sneeze after that a stream of water shot out like a squirt gun.

 

I remember back in the 1980s when the extremely controversial Meir Kahane was invited to town to give a speech at a local Jewish community Center,
and the massive outrage and protests that proceeded his visit due to his racist and ultra-nationalist politics

I didn’t understand the politics at the time, but I do remember the excitement surrounding the visit. - strange how it should stand out in my memory.

 

My memory is pretty foggy, but I remember this one photograph of me and a boy I grew up with. We were wearing the same overalls in two different colors. It was a cute photo.

 

i still have them. filled with phtos i took as a child and those my parents and others had taken and even THEIR baby pictures from before i was born. the earliest is, i was told my parents, my father's father as an infant with his mother's mother and his fathers mother. mostly there are photos i or my parents took of things that interest me more; places we or i had been. oh i've rephoto'd them and have them on my hard disk and backed up to usb drives. my mom kept them after my dad passed away and i inherited them when she did.
anyway the small percentage of them that were taken before i was born were mostly from the 1940s and 30s.
(my father's mother's mother was onondagwa and she looks it, but sadly i have never been able to learn hear real name,
just 'mary' which every girl who's real name someone couldn't or didn't want to pronounce was called. so anyway, that one has to more then a century old)
well other then that, i sure wish they had taken more pictures of public transportation as it had existed in their childhood and adolescense.
most of the pictures are places when my dad got his first car when i was in high school, exploring back roads in the northern sierras and nothern nevada.
and those i'd taken on walks by myself of nature, architecture and trains.
well actually it was just about exactly a century ago now, that my parents were born. my mom in 1919, and my dad, in 1921.
at any rate, the only grand parent i ever actually met was my mother's mom, and that was when she was in the hospital dying, in 1959.
never actually met in person any of my dad's family at all. met my mom's sisters and their kids though.

 

yes I have all my grandmothers albums and photographs, It has photos By william Norman who took photos of people in my family. He is an early canadian photographer. You have probably seen his photographs before and don’t know it. The most recognized he took was of Sitting Bull. Anyways, i have some photos by him that are of people in my family, Are silvered a little from the silver salt used. William Notman and sons is stamped on them. This one is probably one you will recognize. Was on the front of the book. I will fight no more, forever

these photographs are my treasure! Proof of where I came from and what I am, even if the government here denies me of it. But it is just a photograph, right? Ah this chokes me up a little



William Notman & Son, Sitting Bull, Montreal, 1885

 

just an old guy sitting there, who's eyes have seen death justified to rob the values he was born with and replace them with those today are called 'great'.
well i don't have blood count because i've only got one among my great grans, and even i believe culture matters more and i was never raised in any of them.

i only wish though, that i wouldn't have to indenture myself for title to a piece of land to build a permenent and durable shelter of my own fantasy architecture.
or still require permits and to have to build in conventional ways i question the logic and appropriateness of, even if i did.

and that is another childhood, and throughout the rest of my life for that matter memory too. from my long day walks in the woods,
i would dream of doing that, of building a place to live, half underground and non-rectangular,
and only big enough to shelter what needed sheltering and not to impress anyone.

i would sit on a big flat rock and in my mind i would build it right over there, this way and with that and that.

of course i'd probably still require permission of whoever my nearest neighbors would end up being,
but far enough away to be mutually out of each other's sight.

sometimes i would wonder about if someone, who they were, what their life might have been like,
who sat on that same rock a hundred or four hundred or a thousand years before.
what they saw, what kind of other life forms came by and maybe trusted them or not.

in school they taught us history, but it was always ether the country today only a few decades back, or history of people in some other part of the world who came here and invaded,
never a word about what might have been right here where i was at the time. and the arguments for why that was supposed to be more important never made sense.
and the excuse that they never built giant stone temples never did either.

 

nah, it's true that the government can't restrict what you say. hell, look at our president; if there were any laws restricting what you could say, he would be long gone.

unfortunately, free speech applies to businesses as well. so if someone wants to advertise their website as a free speech forum, they can legally do that whether there is a shred of truth to it or not.

 

My little brother was irritating my friend and I when we were kids. So we had an idea to build a fort out of bed sheets and tapestries. And we called it the 7up club. For kids 7 and up. My little brother was 6 at the time.

 

I seem to recall having a Smokey and the Bandit playset. I also may have had a wrestling ring playset complete with action figures. I doubt either one would be worth much these days since they were played with a lot.