It’s maddening sometimes to put things from your early life into perspective. Most of the scant memories are fuzzy …and yet particular moments come into view looking crystal clear. The sights and smells overtake you and you can replay that very minute over and over again. But you cannot travel beyond that moment’s borders nor can you turn your head and look in another direction.
In 1975, I remember sitting out in my family room, a room that was built around an existing patio before we moved in, on top of my rocking horse, and watching the apes from “The Ernie Kovacs Show” on a color television. I also recall “The Jackie Gleason Show” and the Live from Miami Beach… lead-in, although I can’t say I recall “The Honeymooners” specifically. The rocking horse was a Christmas gift from 1973 when I was two years old, but I used it for a couple of years. Always sitting nearby was a small brown rocking chair.
My room had brown wooden floors and red, white, and blue curtains that my Mom made. I had a wooden chest of drawers that belonged to my Dad when he was a kid and a closet with sliding doors. At one point I got a pup tent as a gift and set it up inside my room. Across from my room was the ‘spare room’ and inexplicably the name ‘spare room’ reminded me of a bouncy rubber ball. The room was always cold because there was no reason to keep it heated. Inside the spare room was a crawl space, which I liked to go down into…but was, on the other hand, rather scared to go down into. There was a cruddy old work boot down there and it bothered me.
My Dad had a reel-to-reel tape recorder on which we would often listen to music, especially around Christmas. He had tapes of himself and family that he made when he was young. One time he taped the lead-in of my favorite TV show “Gilligan’s Island” on the tape recorder and I loved listening to it, thinking how amazing it was that I could hear it any time I wanted, even when it wasn’t on TV. I also loved the lead-in to “Green Acres.”
During the summer, I liked to play baseball with my Dad in our sprawling back yard. I could pitch well, but could not yet bat at age three. In our backyard were two clotheslines. The yard was fenced in and my Dad would stand by the fence and talk to our neighbor Rex, who chewed snuff.
I can only assume that all of these memories are from about 1975, which, for some reason, is a relatively lost year when it comes to photographs. It’s entirely possible that some of these event occurred later than 1975, but it seems that I was an only child experiencing these memories. Denise wasn’t born until April 1976.
More scant memories from 1975 will follow..
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