July 8: Childhood memories

So one day I'm asked to write about reminiscing and on another day, I'm asked to write about childhood memories, which is just reminiscing again. At this point, I'm a bit grateful for that ugly ducking black sheep of an entry that I wrote yesterday (that no one liked; that's NOT a hint.) It gave me a break from all that reminiscing.

I have two memories from when I was very young and living in Eastern Canada. I have a vivid remember of seeing a hot dog wrapper on the ground. There were cartoon pictures of people on the wrapper. My dad said that those wrappers came from La Ronde, which is an amusement park in Montreal. In another memory, I am watching my dad write a word in the sand on the beach. The word is FLAG. He spelled it and I said it. I guess I was a good speller back then.

My first friend was a girl named Chera. who is now a real estate agent in British Columbia. We were best friends - inseparable, according to my mom - and I probably cried a little when I learned our family was moving away and I'd never see her again.* Maybe that's better. If Chera and I grew up together, I doubt we'd be like Forrest Gump and Jenny. She became an amazing athlete, a biathlete no less, and I was, well, me.

But I remember Chera and I standing in a cardboard box in the middle of someone's living room. We had imagined the box to be a garbage can so we jumped up and down over and over again yelling "We're in the garbage!" until someone told us that if we didn't stop that, we'd find ourselves in the garbage for real.

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We moved to Calgary in 1976 when I was three. I remember being conscious of the fact that the town house we moved into was the third house in which I had lived in, or at least the third house where I remembered living. Later, we moved to a bungalow in Haysboro, a community in southwest Calgary. I remember enclosing myself in the upstairs closet and playing with a plastic orange number four in there. That's it. No denouement and no preface. Just a dreamlike image. That's what memories are.

I remember being 10 and my mother making a gift of an old camera that produced blurry square photographs. The film just kind of snapped into the back, nothing had to be pulled out and snapped into a loading chamber. I took that camera to Dinosaur Park, where our Grade 4 class was having a springtime camping trip and I took pictures of Robert Millar and Joanne Halligay eating supper, all the guys who slept in the tent I was sleeping in, and Rachel Bouchard, who I may or may not have had a crush on. I also came within a split second of getting a picture of a snake. That didn't work. I did, however, take a selfie of me as well as two strangers who happened to be hiking through the park with their dog. I called the picture STRANGERS and I think my mom was moderately annoyed that I had wasted a picture on them. The dog is dead now.

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I'm not sure where my childhood ended but it was probably somewhere between the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus (age 9) and the first day of Grade 7 (when someone called me a Cornball because he didn't like my choice of reading material in reading period.**) 

When I do magic shows, I tell my audiences that I can pinpoint the exact moment in time when childhood ends. I then ask for a volunteer. Some hands go up. I tell my audience that if their hands are not up, childhood is over. You stop being a kid when you want to stop being the magician's assistant.

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I guess that just about the happiest times in my childhood was when we went on our annual summer vacation to my parents' cottage at Jackfish Lake in Saskatchewan. Grandad had a motorboat and he would take us on pleasure trips and fishing and, much later, water skiing. I loved that cottage and I imagine I could have saved my parents a lot of money if they understood how much I loved it there. I was fortunate enough to go on vacations to Disneyland, Mexico, San Francisco, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. But it's the cottage I remember most.

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 * I did see her again, at least twice. Her family visited our family in Calgary sometime in the mid 80s. I wouldn't see her again until my late 20s, when I was visiting my brother in Vancouver. Chera happened to be there and we got a picture together but I lost it. Bummer.

* The reading material was the James Bond novel From Russia with Love, the cover of which looked too suggestive to one of my classmates, who tattled on me.



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