Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Favorite Memory from Your Childhood”, which…is very ambitious. I think the aging process tends to apply a groovy filter to all our childhood memories, because back then we were full of wonder, hopefully surrounded by people who loved us, and blissfully unladen with responsibilities. I don’t know that I can pick a favorite memory from childhood; I had a pretty good one, I think, for reasons I didn’t appreciate at the time. My parents’ sect forbade televisions in the house, so I spent my youth outside playing with toys or reading, or inside reading and fooling around with the radio. (I used a double-deck cassette player/recorder to create ‘radio shows’ with “DJ Markham” as the host. It’s probably a good thing my school didn’t have an AV club.) There are a lot of things in my youth I didn’t appreciate at the time, like going to my grandparents’ house every single Christmas and spending the entire day there with different waves of family coming in, cresting at meals, and then breaking because they had to go to their other family things. I’d love to go back to one of those mornings; I’ve even dreamt about somehow finding my grandparents’ house in the seventies or eighties when they were younger and full of life. I’d love to sit and listen to them for hours now, when back then I was content to play Pokemon Yellow and counted myself a king because I was able to create a team with all three Blue/Red starters. (On my startlingly magenta GameBoy color. XD)
I had an odd memory from childhood, though, one involving a rally at my church. Kid-me started talking to one of the visitors, a tall — keep in mind I was a kid — man from Africa. I don’t think I’d ever heard a ‘foreign’ accent before, so I was fascinated by him and kept asking questions. After service we were standing outside talking, as people do, and he pointed to the sky, to the stars, and he said that when I looked at the stars I was seeing the same stars he saw at home. He told me that in the future, I could look at those stars and think of our friendship. When I look at the stars, and specifically the Hunter, I feel a strange sense of peace. That moment seems almost surreal now that I am thinking about it, but I have never forgotten that man or his strange gift to a boy who was learning how large the world was, but how close humanity could still be.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Oh, so many dead presidents. Polk. HW Bush.
WHAT are you reading now? Path to Power, Robert J. Caro; Heirs to the Founders HW Brands; and The Pigman, Paul Zindel.
WHAT are you reading next? Um…science fiction!
