write down as many of my earliest memories from childhood as I can remember

We were at one of my grandparents’ neighbor’s houses, I think, for some holiday celebration or birthday party. It was evening and everyone had finished eating and was sitting around the pool talking, drinking, laughing, etc. I asked my grandfather if he would play some songs on the guitar and he said he would if I would go in and get his guitar. I remember him saying, “be careful not to fall in the pool when you come back with it, since it will be difficult to see.”

I went in and found the guitar in its tough black plastic case, textured like leather and it smelled like dust and metal. I grabbed it in both arms and waddled out the kitchen door. Next thing I know, I’ve fallen in the pool and I’m completely confused and worried about having ruined the guitar. Plus, I don’t think I really knew how to swim yet. As I’m recovering on the side of the pool I realize that it was my grandmother (a former nurse) who had leapt into the pool and saved me. I think I had to take swimming lessons after that… which I hated.

On my father’s side of the family there were a couple rascally uncles (Butch and Brad) that us kids loved because they would take us out to do fun adventurous things that other members of the family might rule out as “too dangerous”. One of these last adventures was to go ATVing out in the desert.

I’m pretty certain that me, my sister, and the chosen cousins of appropriate ages (6-12ish?) were trained on how to negotiate the vehicles on the bumpy dirt, given cautious reminders of the dangers involved, and tested on our knowledge before letting us loose. However, I only have two vivid memories of our long afternoon out on the dirt.

The first is one is of me going fairly fast on the ATV and hitting a bump or maybe breaking too fast… in any case, I sailed over the handlebars and landed in front of the ATV, but it was still moving so it then ran me over and stopped with its back wheel on my leg. I remember trying to use the gas handle to make it continue off of me but that just tore my leg up more.

The more serious incident of the day (making my accident seem funny by comparison) was Mark, who drove right into a barbed wire fence, went THROUGH the fence, and hit a tree on the other side. Luckily he was wearing a puffy ski jacket and wasn’t too hurt… but I do remember the skies raining with puffy jacket filler material for quite a while.

One late afternoon when I was 5 or 6 we came home (from our grandparents?) in our green VW van and we thought we heard noise from inside our house. We all entered the house and, as the whole family was walking up the hall to the bedrooms section of the house, a man came running down the hallway with a bunch of things in our arms. Who got knocked down? Was it my sister, Kristy, or was it me? I forget. I think it was Kristy. He got passed us and my mom was between him and the back door. She seemed to be trying to block his escape as they both circled around our living room table… but maybe she was trying to get OUT of his way. In any case, it seemed really dangerous and we pleaded with her afterwards never to do that again. He escaped out the back door, and had to scale a chain link fence… dropping our broken black and white TV (the only thing he had left with him) as a last ditch effort to hop the fence. Other than the getting knocked over and the sketchy confrontation around the table, we were generally amused by the event simply because he failed completely in stealing anything of any value… and almost helped us get rid of some junk.

I didn’t realize until later in life how twisted my experience with animals was in my early childhood. I was an extreme LOVER and DESTROYER of animals. Let me count the ways…

I pulled the tails off of lizards just to see them grow back. I would pull them off one month and catch them again (those easily catchable blue belly lizards of 50214 Kalen Court) a month later to check their baby tiny tails out. I also went through a phase of pulling off their legs but I never found those sorry suckers again.

I caught bees by thwacking them with a twisted towel. I learned this from Todd and Steven, but caught a whole jar of them by twacking them, shaking the jar (to stun the currently captured bees), picking up the newbie by the tail, opening the jar, dropping him in, and closing it back up. My sister told on me and my mom told me to let them go so I let them go on the spot… my mother and sister both got stung. I didn’t. Anti-poetic justice.

I caught 40 crawdads in the man-made river that went through Woodbridge. They all died within a week except for this one blue one that lived for months. I called him Grandpa.

I would go to the beach and catch those little sand crabs that make V’s in the sand as the wave recedes. I would take them home, plop them in a pan, and fill it with tap water. They would all be mysteriously dead the next day.

I had a hermit crab. I wanted to know if it would ever have babies. I had this suspicion it would. One day, tormented by curiosity, I pulled it out of its shell (hermit crabs, I knew, could leave their shells… turns out it has to be voluntary). I tore him in half. Inside, were eggs.

I had a chameleon that I bought through the back pages of Boy’s Life. It died of thirst. And smelled up my room.

I had an aquarium. I filled it with newts. Then I put in frogs. The frogs nipped at the newts, causing their tails and legs to turn to stubs, and eventually die. I put in tiny catfish, and they ate the frogs. I put in crabs, and they ate the frogs and the catfish. The crabs won.

I had a hamster named Gizmo. It got skin cancer and really smelly and eventually died.

I had a green snake that died of dehydration. That was in junior high I think and that was the first time I cried because after this long series of dead pets it finally struck me that I was the problem.

I collected all the worms in my yard and put them in a jar and left the jar out at night. In the morning they had formed a tennis ball-sized ball of worm in order, I assume, to stay warm.

My grandfather installed a cool bee-hive in my bedroom (it had a glass side so I could view their activity and opened up to the outdoors through my window). It was fantastic. One day I left the blinds open in the summer and they all fled to another locale (I assume) because their house got too hot. It’s weird how bees do that.

I got a butterfly kit for Christmas one year. I caught, killed, dipped in alcohol, and pinned oh so many little powdery friends. I also caught my sister numerous times with that net if my memory serves.

Oh, my dream as a child was to open a store called “Invent-A-Pet” where you could genetically design your pet. For example, give it the shell of a turtle, the paws of a kitten, the brain of a dog, and the tail of a dolphin. Genetics, I was told, would be advanced to such a state by my adulthood that such a thing would be trivial. I even decided to major in genetic biology my first year in college… before giving up due to the competitive and mean nature of UC Berkeley and becoming a creative writing major instead.

I do love the animals. I remember thinking as a child that I wished there were a human I could love as much as I loved my black mini poodle, Roxy. My therapist has spent weeks on this issue. Oh, and my poor Russian Blues in Kent, Holden and Phoebe. Me and animals: complicated.

Time to go out and raise one for all the animals I have caused suffering to.

I lived on a cul-de-sac in Chino and a half dozen or so neighborhood kids and I were all sort of a pseudo kid gang. The leaders of our gang were two brothers named Todd and Steven and they were great tour guides into all the “bad” things a kid might be tempted to do.

They taught me how to swear. We would walk up and down the block and they would tell me to yell individual and chains of cuss words and then laugh. Only later (when they had a new kid to teach them to) did I learn that the chained cuss words were actually ordered in such a way as to make the screamer even more ridiculous than he already was.

They taught us which windows to peek into. One window was into our neighbor’s work out room and he would do these bird-like arm-flapping motions and we’d mimic him behind his back. Others were into various bedrooms and bathrooms which, though potentially promising, never really amounted to much.

They showed us where the Playboy stashes were. A half block of houses had been destroyed by a mudslide and these houses were extremely scary and forbidden to us kids. But Todd and Steven could brave it, and somehow procured a stash of Playboys that we’d check out every once in a while, folded up and hidden under a rock.

They taught me how to break off the antennas from cars. Bend, bend, bend, bend, bend, bend, bend, BREAK! I spent the three longest weeks of my life saving my allowance and paying for the three dollar antenna I broke.

Todd or Steven (forget which) once stole my handball. It had been missing for a week or so when suddenly THEY had a new handball. I looked at it closely and saw where my name had been rubbed off (it had been written in sharpie). I stole it out of their bedroom and ran home and had to defend myself when their mom called my mom. They also stole a cup I had made at a neighbor’s house with ceramic. They were total jerks.

I remember one time we were arguing about whether or not there was a hell, and they said that there was and I (growing up atheist) knew there wasn’t. We bet something like a quarter and I shook their hand and then proudly went inside my house and took down the book I had on planets (it was dark blue and part of a series of science books for kids… others were on animals, weather, plants, rocks, etc) and came back outside and showed them the illustration of the inside of the earth. It was solid rock and lava… no room for hell down there! Haha, where’s my quarter now dorks!

I remember when I learned that I was moving to Irvine (the polar opposite of Chino), we were hanging out on their front lawn they asked me if I was going to miss our neighborhood and friends, and I distinctly remember saying no. Well, except for Brandy… my cute 2nd grade crush with blond curls and great tetherball skills.

On either side of my driveway in Chino Hills was this egg-shaped green bush. For some reason, every year the one on the right (when facing the garage) would blossom forth with hundreds of little green caterpillars. And every year I would HARVEST them into little jars and try to keep them alive long enough for them to cocoon up. I only have one tiny memory of a jarred coccoon actually hatching (which makes me think that there are a lot of repressed dead caterpillar memories I don’t have access to). It was a magical crazy moment of crazy proportions. I remember believing that caterpillars turn to liquid in their cocoons like soup and legs and brains swim around in the soup until the soup re-solidifies into a brand new butterfly. Now that I think of it, I do remember peeling cocoons apart, frustrated that they were taking so long. Imagine being 5 or 6 and having to wait WEEKS for a cocoon to hatch. It was pure bloody torture.

The left bush was BORING and never had anything worthy of note. Or, maybe it had invisible caterpillars that had had more time to adapt to the natural selection pressures of curious kids.

I think my first memory occurred on Christmas Day 1979, sitting on the living room, opening presents. I got a big blue and white Tonka dump truck. I then hit my baby sister (perhaps 1 year old at the time) with it because she was being stupid and trying to take it away from me. I suspect that I got in trouble.