authorebiography: Smallest

In which our Hero considers other things of Three, and maybe a smidge beyond that boundary

I was quietly laughing to myself as I read a blog talking about the difficulties of meeting people on dating sites, compared to the old way where you’d just text a friend to find the backstory for your interest. Because the bright shiny youth of the author just rings in that statement and I’m delighted that people can know no other way.

Me, I grew up in a bright and sun-drenched childhood where the mindblowing must-have device was a colour TV. And even having a colour TV didn’t help when the syndicated reruns were mostly black and white. (But oh, the shows! Lost was okay but it was no Gilligan’s Island!)

My memories of childhood dry and coagulate. Attempts to revisit them see them clump and merge so that I remember more structural themes than actual events. But in the dimmest recesses of my childhood, I remember just a few isolated moments. My dad’s brothers feature; I worshipped them. Middle brother leaving for school in Saskatoon and me on my father’s shoulders giving him a salute (and startling him and my parents who had no idea where I’d gotten the gesture). Youngest brother, back “Home,” playfully disbelieving that I can count to 100 and me determinedly proving it to him (In reflection, I’m moved by his kind patience to just let a kid count for him. It doesn’t shock me, but now I can appreciate the other side, the laughing, exasperated affection for a worshipful little boy.) Middle brother bringing me home after nursery school, so again, 3. And me running and then falling and scraping my knee in a terrible, horrible accident that left me with a huge for me-then scar that lasted decades till my mother told me it was a birth mark and had been there all along… …whaaa?

Come to think of it, middle brother fetched me often when he was around. Before he married his beautiful wife and had kids of his own.

I remember a red-brown sofa with a pinwheel pattern that was instant lava whenever my imaginary play required it. (Awkward, mind, when you’re sitting on your imaginary lava field as you play, but there’s no cognitive dissonance and kids seem to naturally accept that they can be in or out of the scene) And another sofa that was a earthy green. And a comfy recliner that was my astronauts couch, because clearly in every space show they put the astronauts in positions that perfectly approximated La-Z-Boys. But to make it distinct from just being in an easy chair, I’d sit backwards, my feet in the air and my back on the seat, pushing the recliner to recline when it was time “to launch.” So you can tell my head was in the stars pretty early on.

I wasn’t exactly a saint, but I’m told I was a sweet kid. I did have a predilection to not eating everything I was given and the mistaken belief that hiding my food behind furniture was a good way of getting out of eating it. My parents snicker as they tell the younger kids now how they used to put extra spices into my dinners and tell me I couldn’t have my drink till I’d eaten a certain number of bites.

We didn’t have stupid rules about safety and forget booster seats strapped down in the back seat, hell, seat-belt laws themselves were a relatively new idea and the back seat was the wild west, no rules, no restrictions just a great big bench for me to sit on, sleep on, or jump on as I elected and my parents let slide.

And started then, the curious trend that has followed me through life, of having a name that until modern globalization was completely unheard of, except for the one person with the exact same name who somehow wound up in the same program/class/seminar as me. Except they called my namesake-across-the-green S—; Well, it’s a diminutive of a sort. Anyway…

Um.. Yeah. I’m told I was a placid toddler, not too demanding, not too aggressive, generally sweet and affectionate (but honestly, how many toddlers don’t tagged that way by their parents?)

My parents read to me. So my love of words started early too, I was an early reader. And then toddlehood ended when some lady with bright white hair came to talk to me and my mother. Turned out she’d be my Junior Kindergarten teacher. But I didn’t know that yet.