remember

go indians

when i was in elementary school in iowa, we sometimes went to high school basketball games on friday nights. i remember the smell of the gymnasium, and the warm honey colour of the wood floor.

[written 16 october; posted 20 october]

stinger

our neighbour was babysitting us the day i stepped on a hornet. i was about five, and playing barefoot outside on a summer's evening. i remember running down the front steps, and then screaming. our neighbour made up an outmeal paste and pulled out the stinger.

[written 13 october 2007; posted 14 october]

sasha dolls

as a girl, i had a blonde sasha doll in a gingham dress.

if you touch this hammer....

i know next to nothing about the comic book character thor. in fact, i had to search the web to confirm he was indeed a comic book hero and not in some 1970s movie or tv show instead. what i do know, i learned from a bag that raleigh had when we were little. it was yellow, plastic coated, and if my memory serves me correctly, had some thor comic strips printed on its side.

somehow, long before raleigh could read, we latched onto thor as our superhero of choice, and we used what i guess was a modification of a phrase from the side of that yellow bag when we were playing. we couldn't remember the whole thing, so we made up a word in the middle. although i've never seen it written, the word was something like "emp-a-size" and our phrase was this: "if you touch this hammer, you will be emp-a-sized" into thor."

as an adult i've often wanted to find that yellow bad and find out whether that phrase was even on it, and if so, what that missing word was. now of course if you search the web for "if you touch this hammer" you get back a dozen links to the lyrics of mc hammer's "can't touch this," which is of course a different thing all together.

[written 1 october; published 2 october]

yankee doodle

when raleigh was a little boy, my parents bought him a doll. i think it technically was a girl, but raleigh decided she was a he and named him "yankee doodle."

[written 30 september; posted 2 october]

secret codes and s/.t

as a child i was fascinated by secret codes. i read books about them, wrote letters in them and deciphered any message i could get my hands on. i created some codes of my own, then shared them with raleigh so we could use them to communicate in our many forts. i think this was maybe why as a student i was so interested in foreign languages. is there really that much of a difference?

in iowa, we had a small black room in our basement. while it smelled of photographic developing solutions, it was rarely actually used, so raleigh and i set up a great fort in there. at one point, we used some code or another to create a password, which i remember had something to do with the brand of zipper that i had on my jacket. (confused? yes, well so am i but perhaps that's because we're adults now and have lost the unbounded creativity that comes with youth). the resulting password from this jacket and code combination was "s/.t" which i distinctly remember saying over and over "s slant dot t, s slant dot t." it's unfortunate that i no longer remember how it translated.

[written 23 september; posted 24 september]

the willow tree

my grandma peters had a willow tree in her garden and we hid under its branches.

[written 7 september; posted 8 september]

hives

for several weeks one summer, raleigh and i made a fort in the evergreen bushes outside of unity church. it seemed like a perfect hideaway until i had some sort of allergic reaction to the sap in the branches and broke out in hives.

a little book for raleigh

i apparently made this for raleigh at some point. on the first page i suggest that he try to read it, but then i get distracted on about page three and turn it into a psychedelic design booklet without any words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

snugglee

when i was five, our dog blackie had puppies. each of us in the family had a favourite from the litter, but ultimately we voted democratically which one we should keep, and mine was the winner. i named her snugglee, spelled intentionally this way because i wanted her to have the same middle name as me.

snugglee was, true to her name, snuggly, with long black fur. she was an outdoor dog and not terribly well groomed, but what she lacked in beauty she made up for in character. she lived for fifteen long years, dying of old age while i was living abroad in russia during university.

[written 29 august 2007; posted 1 september 2007]