recall 75 memories and lessons I learned from them

My mom had this silly game that she would play with my sister when she was little. Mom would recite the aforementioned line in a menacing voice and my sister Lindsay would run away squealing, pretending to be scared of the Giant (Mom). This particular session, I think Lindsay was around 6 maybe, and Mom decided to get a laugh out of Lindsay at bedtime. Lindsay was tucked in, ready for bed, as Mom approached, reciting the dreaded words “Fee Fi Fo FUM” and on the word Fum, rocketed herself onto Lindsay in bed. I don’t know if it was the force of Mom landing on her, or the shock of it, but Lindsay was shouting “Mom! You made me pee my pants!” Literally. HAHA Lindsay, you peed the bed!!

Lesson learned: Don’t let Mom jump on you when you bladder is full.

Growing up, I had the best of both worlds. Seriously. My parents divorced when I was 5, and I lived with my mom during the week and visited dad on the weekends. I had a really close friend that I was permanently glued to on the weekends named Brianne. When I wasn’t over her house, I was on the phone to her. Constantly. I loved going over her house because a) they lived in a kick-ass house and her parents were hella-cool b) they had a siamese cat named Alex that was hella-cool and c) her younger brother always had the latest video game systems/games, and because he had a huge crush on me, he would let me play to my heart’s content, which was hella-cool.
This particular night, I had just finished a nutritious meal of Chef Boyardee spaghetti in a can, washed down with fruit punch from Cumberland Farms (you Massholes and RI’ers will know what I’m talkin’ bout, the stuff that came in the gallon jugs). Brianne calls me up and asks if I want to sleep over. I stuff some clothes into a bag and race around the block to her house, I swear, I get there even before she had hung up the phone. We hang out in her room all night, lip-synching to Madonna (she loved Madonna, and because she was my best friend I let on that I did as well, even though I couldn’t stand her then, or now). We danced our way through all her NKOTB tapes, and laughed crazily at Alex, the weirdest cat ever. By the time I was nestled in my sleeping bag on her bedroom floor, my stomach was not feeling too great. ALl the running, spinning, and giggling and churned my additive-laden supper into a bubbling pit of sickness. Before I could stop it, I was emptying my tummy onto her white (who uses white carpeting in a kid’s bedroom?) carpet. Now, anyone who knows the aforementioned fruit punch knows that it is redder than the devil’s ass, and mixed with the chef’s pasta,well it wasn’t pretty. I tiptoed into the bathroom, grabbed a box of Kleenex, and in the dark, did my best to, um, scoop the mess. That being done, the carpet still looked like a crime scene. So I did what any 13 year old would do. I covered the stain with a backpack I found in Brianne’s closet and went back to sleep. Strangely enough, nothing was ever mentioned about the stain…
And I just realised that out of 10 memories, 2 of them involve vomiting well-known food products (see number 7). Perhaps I will go for a trifecta….
Lesson learned: Just because Dad calls it dinner doens’t mean its edible.

Upon rereading this entry, I have decided to edit it some, simply because I realise how insanely private it is. I must have been feeling very open the day I posted it! Its enough to know that this memory will be with me forever, as much as I despise the thought. And my lessons learned are too numerable to fathom.

7. OK, so this memory starts off as an incomplete, simply because I can’t remember what movie I had just seen, Gremlins or E.T. Both scared me silly when I was younger. Anyways, we had just come back to my grandparents house after a night at the movies, seeing whichever of those movies that scared the bejesus out of me. My mother had asked me to go down to the laundry room in the basement to get the clothes out of the dryer. Now I have to preface this story by saying that my grandparents’ basement was the alltime spookiest place on earth to me. As you walk down the stairs, there is a little window with a wooden door over it that opens up into my Papa’s workshop. I loved being in the workshop with him, but when it was empty, I wanted no part of it. Creepy stuff. There was also a little room under the stairs that housed goblins, I’m sure of it, and a boiler room that was haunted. SO needless to say, going down into that basement on the best of days was a traumatic experience for 8 year old little me.
I was trying to put the laundry into the wicker basket as fast as I could that night, trying not to think about where I was or to hear all the creepy noises around me, when suddenly it went completely dark. Someone upstairs, not knowing that I was down there, had noticed the light on, and being the energy conserving people that they are, switched it off and left me enshrouded in darkness. I was so scared I managed to throw up all over the basket of clean laundry I had just taken out of the dryer. (Raisin, Date, and Walnut Quaker Oats, if I remember correctly. Then I had to sprint past the boiler room. past the door under the stairs, and worst of all, past the workshop window. Ugh, just thinking about it now gives me the heebie-jeebies.

6. I must have been around 7 years old, I was over my aunt’s house playing with Marisa, who I think is a distant cousin, and was about a year younger than me. My aunt’s house was a few blocks away from a playground, and when I had tired of playing in the house, I asked my aunt if we could go to the playground. She said yes, I’m sure she said yes meaning she would take us later, but in my mind she had given me carte blanche to take Marisa with me and go ourselves. I pulled the chair over to the screen door and unlocked it, and off we went. We were there for what seemed like ages, I can remember Marisa crying and wanting to go home, but I was having way too much fun to even consider leaving. The next thing I know, I see my uncle’s red Jeep pull up, and the pastor of the church rode up on his bicycle. My uncle took Marisa back to the house, and I rode on the back of the bicycle. When we got back to my aunt’s house, I knew I was in trouble. I think my mom AND dad were there, which is a big indication of how scared they were that I was missing, considering they were divorced by that point. I think there was a squad car there as well, because as my mom was spanking me, I was thinking that the police should handcuff her so she couldn’t reach my bottom =)
I think that day I learned that I should be more scared of the outside world than I was.

5. Same as previous post, I was in the sixth grade and we had just moved to a new city a few months previous. There was a boy about my age living next door to us, Christopher Dupre, who used to tease me all the time. I guess he must have resented the fact that he had to walk with me to school every day. It was just after a big snowstorm, I think we must have had a snow day, and I was out in the parking lot helping my mom shovel snow and clear off the car. Chris was out there too, and all I remember is his relentless teasing, his voice getting higher and higher and higher in pitch, and my blood pressure rising with every word. I must have said something to my mom about hitting him, I can remember saying “Mom, can I?” and her saying “Go for it”, which probably wasn’t the best idea, considering I had the snowshovel in my hands. I swung around and caught him mid-sentence and next thing I know, his nose was gushing blood. After he ran into the house, I can remember feeling a strong comraderie with my mother for some reason, and a strong sense of something close to feminism as well.
Perhaps that day I learned the power that I have within myself, and how quickly I can go from being a docile, quiet girl to a raging lunatic LOL.

Oh, and by the way, he never teased me again after that day. Sorry about your nose, Chris.

4. I was in the 6th grade, and my father had just taken me to my first concert. We went to go see the Bangles, who I was absolutely obssessed with. I begged and pleaded until he bought me a tour t-shirt, a really cool tye-dyed one with a picture of them on the front and all the tour dates on the back. That following Monday, I decided to bring my new shirt to school with me to wear during PE class. Of course, it went missing and I was crushed. Until the following Monday, when this big bully in my class Robin Zab showed up for school. She was like 6 feet tall (keep in mind, this is a sixth grader), and she was one of those scary types with the long dark hair hanging in her face, kind of like the freaky TV girl in the movie The Ring. Well, she showed up for class wearing MY BANGLES TSHIRT. And what did I do about it? Absolutely nothing. Didn’t tell the teacher. Didn’t confront the Zab monster. Wouldn’t even look her in the eye to give her the satisfaction of knowing that I was heartbroken.
Not too long ago, my mom wrote something about me, saying that when I was a baby, I hardly ever cried, and she was always waiting for me to do so, to speak up for myself. I guess some things never change, because I still don’t have that backbone that everyone else seems to be born with. I think the lesson I learned from looking back on this memory is that you can only be someone’s doormat if you lay yourself down on the ground.

3. It was 1985, I can remember the year because my mother was pregnant with my sister. I was 8 years old, and having been an only child for my whole life, I was a little unsure as to how I felt about becoming a big sister. I can remember my stepfather coming home with a big cardboard Pampers box and I was like “More stuff for the baby. Big deal.” But he set the box down in the kitchen and turned it around…inside was a puppy! I was so excited, I had never had a dog before, I didn’t know what to do with myself! I think he was a Chihuahua, and we named him Sinbad. I can remember him crying a lot in the kitchen that night, and I wanted to take him upstairs in my bed with me but my mom wouldn’t let me. She had decided that it wasn’t a good idea to have a puppy and a new baby at the same time, so the puppy had to go. I think she must have been mad at my stepfather for bringing Sinbad home without checking with her first. I went with my Mom to bring Sinbad to the pet shop where we left him. She kept saying how proud she was of me for being so strong and grown up about it all. I can’t even recall what sort of feelings I had at the time, nor can I even remember crying.
I think it was because of that experience that I began to realise that having a new baby in the house was going to affect me too, not just my mom and my stepfather.

2. Seeing how the holiday season is almost upon us, I was thinking back to Christmases past, and I can vaguely remember the one when I figured out there was no santa. I must have been around 6 or 7 years old, and I was at my grandparents’ house, when I came upon a box for an Annie limousine. It was a week before Christmas, and I was thrilled to bits that they had gotten me THE present that I wanted! I carefully put it back into the closet and waited the agonising week until I could open it at Christmas and play with it. Well, when my family went to my grandparents’ home that Christmas morning, I rushed into the living room to make sure that they hadn’t forgotten to put it under the tree. None of the other presents mattered to me, only that one. My eyes instantly picked it out among the others, and as I was opening it with my family watching, I happened to notice the tag on the box…”To Sarah” “From Santa”. Why would Santa have hidden my toys in Gram and Papa’s bedroom closet a week before Christmas? As reality slowly started to set in, I think a little bit of the magic of Christmas was lost for me that year.
Looking back on it now, I think the lesson I learned is that sometimes, the less you know the better off you are.

1. One of my favorite memories is from the autumns of my youth, when I would help my grandfather rake the leaves in his yard. I always loved going to their house, and especially loved spending time with Papa. He used to pay me $1 for every bag I filled with leaves, but looking back on it now, I didn’t care about the money. I felt so proud that he thought I was grown enough to help him with such a grown-up job (that and the fact that he made the best leaf piles to jump in!)
To this day, the smell of leaves and the feeling of them crunching under my feet brings me back to those times with my Papa in Massachusetts. I learned from a very early age that hard work doesn’t have to be work if you are in good company.