By The Book Reviews

An early childhood memory is helping my mother sterilize baby bottles on the stove, for my younger siblings.

I used to walk to a pool in a park about a mile away, with my younger brother and sister, Saturdays. That was a real treat.

One awful but funny thing was when my brother stepped on a rake. He was running in the yard and the rake had fallen, hidden in the grass, prongs up. Not only did he puncture his foot when he stepped on the prongs, but the rake handle came up and hit him in the head, knocking him down!

My father was a pilot and would be gone weeks at a time. But when he got home watch out.

My mother used to take me on a day trip to New York City and we went in the art museums, that was great.

One time my father had a dent in the bumper, and wanted to straighten it out, so he tied the bumper to a fire hydrant in front of our house–the neighbors teased us forever that he was trying to pull out the fire hydrant!

I owned a motorcycle briefly. I wanted to ride it to high school instead of walking the two miles. I got no cooperation to learn to ride and then my father made me sell it.

I had to go to summer school to get to high school, that was no picnic.

We were 4 boys, 1 girl. The boys played all sports except football, football was not allowed because of the risk of serious injury.

With five kids, we never had a board game long before the pieces/cards were lost or chewed up. We tried to keep playing cards and games on high shelves, but since we were always watching toddlers when we played, damage was inevitable.

I was the eldest, so I was held responsible for everything. Supposedly I could have stopped or prevented whatever four other kids did.

When I was about five I had a toy car big enough to ride in. I was king of the sidewalk.

One Christmas when I was ten, my Dad gave me a couple bucks to buy a toy for my five-year-old retarded and autistic brother. He loved to watch cars on our street, so I found a model car that had doors that would open and rubber tires–well made for its day, about 8″ long. He lit up when he opened it, and ALWAYS had it with him for over a year. That is a great memory.

When I was 5 and lived in Connecticut, it snowed so deep we couldn’t open the front door and had to go out a window!

When I was five my Mom made me a snow fort in the apartment yard. When the snow started to melt, it seemed not affected. Then I saw a seven-year-old neighbor girl walk through the fort, crumbling the ceiling! I knocked on her door and demanded to know why! She finally said she was jealous of my fort. I said I wouldn’t have minded if she wanted to be in there, and we went all over the complex trying to find snow (under porches etc) but couldn’t find enough to fix it, and it was completely gone the next day!

I used to go over to a friend’s house just to read the encyclopedia her family had.

On my fifth birthday, several friends from the apartments, and one out-of-town girl, came over. We had a lolipop hunt in the apartment, then we got cardboard boxes, flattened them, and slid down a hill (repeatedly). The hill was only about 20 feet high, but to a five year old it was pretty big.

On one of my birthdays, my father, who was a pilot, flew in lobsters from Maine!

Art & Erica - if it’s just the three of us, we will probably be the ones winning the three books!

I remember the first (and only) time I tried skateboarding. My neighbor friend that was a year older and I walked up to the top of a nearby road that had a pretty good slope to it. She made it look easy and of course, I ended up falling and skinning quite a bit of skin off of one thigh. Needless to say, I didn’t try skateboarding again!

We have photos of all the kids in cowboy gear, when we visited a ranch in Texas.
It’s not even halfway to June 11, so we could have company on this board, but we are certainly ahead.

I rode a bike for my paper route.

I was given a “hand-me-down” bike from a family friend (that was going into college). I called it Two Ton Tessie since it was really big and had shock absorbers between the handlebars and front tires. It was blue with white wall tires and I rode it everywhere.

In 8th grade, I had just broken up with my boyfriend who was in 10th grade, and his best friend asked me to be his date at his huge 16th birthday party. His older sister and her husband didn’t know and judged a dance contest, forty people, with every song they eliminated one boy and one girl. My old boyfriend had a date quickly eliminated and we kept pairing up not with each other but were the final two and had to dance together. Very painful for all concerned.

We lived in New Jersey with lots of woodland nearby.

In grade school we lived on a corner lot with a street light. We were allowed to play in the yard late in the summer, under the street light. Sometimes we pretended to be horses stranded on an island, and got down on all fours and made up horse names and traits for ourselves.

My younger brother John did all the falling out of trees for the whole family. I never broke a bone and rarely had a scrape.

I hope we are not still due for broken bones. None of us got them, though one brother was constantly getting wounds. My worst time was a 1/2″ fence splinter that went through my foot, between toes, I was about nine, and the whole neighborhood gathered to watch me remove it–very painful.

My little brother and I went on a 5 mile hike one day. We packed a backpack with sandwiches and a thermos of chicken noodle soup. Half way around, we stopped to eat our lunch at a bench on the side of the road. A little dog came over to us and we thought it was so cute so we gave it some soup. It looked hungry. Well, it followed us all the way home. My parents thought we’d better find out who it belonged to so they drove us back and there was a farm right next to where we found it. The dog was a puppy from a litter on the farm and they said we could keep it. I named her Tina and trained her in my 4H dog training class and she was with us for 20 years!

I used to wake up at 4am rather regularly when I was 10-15 years old. Saturdays, it was not polite to call on neighbors/friends until 9am I was told, so I used to make a 20-mile walk from the suburbs downtown and to the bay and back. It took exactly 5 hours and then I would be able to do activities with others.

That reminds me of the first time I rode a bike with hand brakes. Some older kids let me ride somebody’s bike with them, and we came to a road with traffic, I started pedaling backward and wasn’t stopping, the oldest guy was next to me and knocked me into a culvert (we both went down) but at least I wasn’t run over.

We used to build tree forts in the woods and the girls had one fort and the boys had their own fort. We took boards, hammer and nails and used boards as steps to get up to the first branches. One fort we used a beech tree and the first branches are high off the ground. We had the brilliant idea to make a rope ladder with only a string hanging (tied to a nail) to pull it down. Of course, the boys figured this out and tore up our tree fort. We were so mad at them.

I went to high school in the Bahamas and one summer my brothers and I took a diving class (diving off a board into a pool, not ocean diving). One day after the lessons, we were goofing around hanging off the 3 meter board and flipping into the water. My hand slipped and I ended up falling and crashing onto the edge of the pool, getting a huge gash across my knee. Luckily, it only required lots of stitches and not repairing anything else like my kneecap or tendons/ligaments. The lifeguard wrapped it in layers and layers of gauze wrap and the nurse at the hospital had a terrible time cutting through all the layers.

We got our first color TV in 1967 and loved watching Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on Sunday nights. I finally realized that the Wizard of Oz changed from black & white to color during the movie.

Apparently, some of my posts have disappeared.
I remember my father walking me to school for the first day of first grade, on a shell path, with cotton fields all around. Now that school would be in the middle of town, except it was torn down for the new post office.

We used to find wild strawberries in this one field about 1/2 mile from my house. They were small but really sweet and were usually eaten by the time we got home. Our neighbors had a really big mulberry tree and we would have purple stains all over our feet and clothes from picking mulberries.

My mother had about ten meals that she would rotate. Mainly, I set the table.

I remember when my sister got the Beatles White album for her birthday. We only had a record player and a radio for music so it was a big deal. We played it so much that my mom probably hates the album now.

We would set up the card table and do jigsaw puzzles. There was always a puzzle going and everyone would come along and do a few pieces or sit down and do a lot. Some good conversations over puzzles.

I don’t know why my June 4 or 5 posts disappeared. I wrote about injuring my foot, we are going for a book with a girl raped and blacking out from drugs, and other posts discuss injuries, so I don’t get it.
I probably like reading partly because my father forbade the reading of fiction and tried to keep his kids from TV when I was in grade school. But it was easy to sneak books because he was always working late.