My earliest school experiences were either preschool, kindergarten, or very early grades.  I don’t remember which or much about them, but as I’m trying to put together some childhood memories before they disappear, it’s school time.  The school that had me feeling the youngest was an overtly christian one in a rustic looking piece of suburb.  The driveway and parking lot were gravel and dust, and there were largish deciduous trees all around.  Probably this was preschool?

I remember making gingerbread houses for xmas.  I’m not sure if we used legit ginger pieces or the cheapo version, with graham crackers, but the icing was good enough.  We built them around trimmed down milk cartons, as a mold.  Seems like an advanced craft for somebody who had only been walking for a few years.  Of course, there were hand turkeys and all the usual shit.

There was a playground with some pretty good-sized equipment.  I remember the centerpiece of it was almost like a house.  I could stand up to my full height under the platform.  I wasn’t a total misfit, but I was very outnumbered by girls.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I played Bosley to some Charlie’s Angels at some point, of which my sister was one.  Hey, she was a biracial angel years before Ella Balinska was born.

Again, I feel like I had a girl or two who were fascinating me and I didn’t understand why yet.  Not precisely, but I was kinda precocious in this regard.  One of the girls looked kinda like me with light eyes and buck teeth, but had short black hair*, and another one had long brown hair.  Maybe I was more interested in the brown-haired girl but got along with the black-haired one better?  I have a dim memory that I might have gotten as far as baby-styled “going steady” if I’d stayed there much longer.  We never did stay in one school for long, as it happened.

We’d play tag with these rules.  The person who was “it” knocked on the playground house and the people inside say, “who’s there?” It says “Big Bad Wolf.” We say “What do you want?” It says “Colored eggs.” We say “What color?” and It has to guess. When they guess the color you were thinking, you had to run out of the shelter and get chased?  My recollection breaks down here.

We had a cat at some point and lost it.  I forget the cat’s name but think it was orange tabby.  This bothered me enough that when a teacher told us about prayer, that was the first thing I prayed for.  No dice.  Further, while I could conjure a vague white glow when I closed my eyes and did the rigamarole, I realized that I was just imagining it, and that stopped it cold.  When you tell a kid about prayer for the first time, there’s probably more clever ways to do it, ways less likely to result in atheism.  They blew it and I was an atheist for life already.  Not long after that, I remember realizing I didn’t even remember the missing cat – not really – and was disturbed by the fact.  Growing brains do weird things.

There was a school play where I had to perform as a shepherd, with a crappy sheep hook made out of paper towel rolls and constantly falling to pieces.  On the night of the play I don’t know if I even got in two words before I turned bright pink and laughed until they removed me from the stage.  Earliest memory of this tendency I have, but it’s still a thing.  Usually happens in situations where I should be afraid, and am on a subconscious level.  Like the ghoulish humor I fell into when my husband had his gall bladder removed and was all messed up.

There was another school-esque situation we were in for a minute, in a more urban location.  Where that one had been gravel and grass, this one was beauty bark and concrete.  More shadows from neighboring buildings.  I didn’t get along with anyone but don’t remember fighting.  Just remember an enforced nap time that I was usually awake through.  And breaking a finger for the first time.  I’d gone off alone and was finding the cool metal of the front gate appealing.  I ran my little hand inside a groove there, and when it opened automatically for a car, snappo.  Not a serious break, but enough that the staff should’ve done something about it sooner than they did.

Lastly, I remember another school which tried to teach us American Sign Language.  This was more like a regular school so probably first grade.  I was ahead on English skills so it felt like baby school.  I fancied myself an artist but I was the only one in class that fucked up our papier-mâché Easter eggs, by not putting enough mâché on that shit.  I probably cried.  I recall starting to hate school about then.  I remember this school was racially diverse and had those big tires on the playground you could hide in, maybe monkey bars? but little else.

These were the only schoolish experiences I’m pretty sure happened when we were living in that housing project.  I remember nothing of the teachers except that they were women.

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*Wow, it’s really weird with these memories of memories, how removed they are, trying to feel your way back to something like this.  Maybe her name was Iris**?  And for the life of me I can only picture her as looking like one of my own childhood pictures with darker hair and more colorful clothing.  Eh, small enough kids all look the same, so probably not all that inaccurate.

**There are mandolins in that song?  I didn’t remember that.  Why didn’t I remember that?

Still writing about the earliest epoch of my childhood, in mid-California suburbs. Now, I don’t remember having seen Karate Kid back then, but I must have, because one year I wanted to be a The karate kid for halloween.  Ralph Macchio was a barefoot king, and by gum I would be barefoot as well… but no, mom kibosh’d that shit.  I felt like the costume was ruined.  Probably my tender feets were grateful tho, especially as this was before plastic bottles were more prevalent, and there was broken glass fuckin’ everywhere.

This post is about excursions, trips, jaunts even.  Things that didn’t happen at home.  Some of this was in the homes of family members I didn’t really know.  I think my aunt Margaret was one, my aunt Pat was another.  I remember little about them from that time, but Pat’s condo had exercise equipment and a refrigerator full of one of the early diet pops – Tab.  I wonder if it contributed to her colon cancer later on, or if that was just the same mutation that was likely to blame for mine.  Only known LGBTetc person from that generation of my ancestors, a Frisco dyke as they say.  I did see her again as an old lady, slept in that same condo one night as a bald-headed starving artist.  Exchanged some awkward emails with her when needing a favor; did not pan out.  She was a privately cold and publicly difficult person to get along with for more than brief times.  My brother got along with her better, while living in the Bay Area for college.

Back to the kid years.  At some point we were at a family member’s house with a swimming pool in the backyard.  My brother almost got himself drowned, not sure how.  My dad remembers the incident as him arriving to see that our mom, who was supposed to be watching us, had her nose buried in a book and missed it – that  he had to dive in and save the boy.  I don’t even remember him being there.  In my mind it could have been our mom that saved him, but I’d trust his memory of this better since he wasn’t six years old.

I recall seeing the drawings by a cousin, a teenage boy who drew nothing but cars.  I was plenty impressed.  There’s a picture from around that time of me sitting on the couch with a teenage boy and I feel like there was some implication from someone somewhere at sometime that the kid was up to no good.  No idea who this was or how true that was.  Pretty sure it wasn’t my Bay Area hipster cousin Dave, who looks like Dave Gahan, tho I think he does work on cars.

There was a lot of dry grass in the world, yellow and scratchy.  In my grandparents’ driveway I got stung by tripping and landing with my hand on a dead bee.  Same driveway where I lost a fingernail in a car door.  I just remembered my grandmother had a red volkswagen bug.

We went to a family reunion with a bunch of people I never knew and will never know.  Again, it was a situation of wealth, the cornucopia opened for all the little goblins who stole into the banquet chamber, and I was left for years afterward associating the term “family reunion” with nice food that I wasn’t allowed to have.  It was in a large park with green grass and covered picnic areas, with heavy wooden beams.  Frisbees flew.  I don’t even remember now what the nice food was, aside from watermelon.

We went on at least one, possibly more excursions to mountains and forests.  On one such occasion I almost got hit by a car, running across a road – one of those roads that curves around a hill and has no need for crosswalks or sidewalks.  Mom yelled on me.  On another trip, my dad got a tick on his ass, and my mom got it out while we were standing around, looking away.  There were big trees and a big wooden suspension bridge there.  Might it have been the famous Redwood Forest?  My dad has a deep voice and at some points in his life has successfully come off as Joe Coolguy, but I remember many more occasions of him suffering humiliations and defeats.

For that and other trips, I remember the car we were in – a big rusty white station wagon I’ve previously mentioned.  Once again, my midj’ing of it:

I remember vaguely sleeping in it, with the back seats folded forward.  Car interiors now tend to be plastic; this was unyielding and cold metal.  A thin sleeping bag doesn’t much improve that, but it’s fun to feel adventurous.

I might remember more bits and bobs about this part of my life sometime, but for now, one last thing that stands out for me.  We used to go to a big drive-in theater.  In my memory it was much much larger than the late-surviving one from my town of Auburn WA, which finally shuffled off the mortal coil in 2012.

I don’t know how old I was, but I must have felt like a non-presence in the back seat – some assumption I would pass out hard enough they could watch whatever they wanted without forming lifetime memories in my skullpiece.  Guess again, fools!  I remember impressions of a racecar driver movie with one brief scene of full frontal nudity.  Was it Stroker Ace?  There was one with Kenny Rogers, right?  Why am I imagining there was one with John Denver?  Don’t @ me bro.

I will also cherish the memories of memories of Dolly Parton and co-stars doing weird adult things in Nine to Five.  I’d put Dabney Coleman in bondage too.  Understandable…  As much as the movie was ostensibly about ladies getting revenge for dude malfeasance, in retrospect it feels like a masochist’s wet dream.  Who’s been a naughty boy?  Don’t hurt me ladies.  Wink.

We watched some kind of Disney movies too.  At some point in my life, I’ve seen Snow White, Cinderella, 101 Dalmations, and The Rescuers, any one of which might have been in that theater, as far as my brain can work out.  But more memorable is what I was not supposed to be seeing.

Looking out the back window while some kid movie was playing in front, I saw an adult cartoon that strains believability.  I don’t think it was Fantastic Planet, though you’re going to want to tell me it was.  It was much pervier.  In my faint baby memories, it involved cartoon colored people in a fantasy environment, with their naughty bits all hanging out, and sex scenes.  No, not Heavy Metal either.  In my head, the plot was about somebody losing his turquoise cartoon wiener and trying to find it, like the story of Detachable Penis by King Missile, long form.  At some point in the 1990s, I came across a likely suspect for this movie at a Suncoast Video in the Supermall.  I thought for sure I’d remember what it was called this time, but no.  Suncoast went out of business and I never saw it again.  Back to KinderTrauma with my ass.

flashing lights on this video

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content warnings:  child sex abuse mention tho i don’t go into any detail at all, child neglect and abuse, class strife.

Found out recently my maternal grandparents both died around ten years ago, which means they had easily found online obituaries.  My paternal grandparents both died before that, and are not so easily found.  This means nearly nothing to me, in stark contrast to PZ’s experience.  I once had an article about the magic twenty thousand dollars that everybody but me seems to get, but that isn’t wholly true.  From my paternal grandfather the broadly esteemed superannuated horrifyin’ secret criminal, my dad got around twenty-five grand, of which he gave some amount to me.  I don’t recall how much, but I used it all on rent while being underemployed as a freelance artist.

Per this article, I’m expanding on the things I can remember from early childhood before they evaporate.  I was born and raised through earliest childhood in suburban California, and previously discussed things that happened in or around my family’s apartment in the housing project.  The other things I can remember from back then took place in other locations, to which those memories belong.

There’s a geographical aspect of memory, where things that take place in a given location will be continuous with each other and run in parallel to experiences from another – home life versus work life, for example – and after the fact it can be harder to remember when a memory happened relative to a memory from a parallel timeline.  In this article I’ll look at Grandparents’ House timeline – events at my non-cybermemorialized paternal grandparent’s residence, in a much nicer neighborhood than my own.

My father had a horrible childhood, victim of violence neglect and abuse from many directions.  He’d have very good reason to want nothing to do with his parents, and yet poverty will bring one around, hat in hand.  Especially because those parents were beneficiaries of the best economy in the 20th century, fucked up nightmare dad being a union carpenter rolling in greenbacks.

Worse still, he left his own children in the care of those parents often enough that I have a lot of memories of that time.  Did I get abused by them?  Not that I recall, so it was a gamble that paid off.  Unless of course my older sister was abused by dad’s nightmare dad, which is distinctly possible.  Fucken sigh.  How did I not make that connection until now?  Ain’t no justice possible in any of that.  The monster was instantly killed in a car accident in his 90s without having known a moment of remorse nor of punishment.

That grandfather used to drink buttermilk straight out of a tall glass.  His skin was sun-damaged, his hair white when I was a small child, and the whites of his dead grey eyes yellow or blood-red most of the time.  Looked a bit of the monster that he was, not that all of those traits couldn’t be found on a wonderful human being, up to and including the dead-eyed expression.  I saw him go for the buttermilk and gave it a try, as a child.  Was not to my tastes.

That grandmother was dark-haired and wore big-ass eyeglasses.  They were those transition types that turn into sunglasses outdoors, but the technology wasn’t worked out back then, and they looked fairly sunglass’d indoors as well.  I don’t remember her eyes, probably because of this.  I do remember one humiliating time when I had to revert to diapers due to a stomach illness and she changed them in the living room.  I can understand not wanting to get out of your lazy boy, but unpleasant, and in view of the gross granddad who mocked me.  I don’t recall the words, which is probably a good thing.

My brother did that 23andme bullshit, which said we had 25% Iberian ancestry.  That was so specific it made me think I had a secret portuguese or spanish grandma.  The grandpas were too northern looking.  And yet, those grandmas both had well-establish USian roots with UK-derived surnames galore.  So this grandmother, not spicy, unless adopted.  Portugal had a historically close relationship with England and probably it’s random ingress from that kind of thing.  In the US it’s all whitey.  These distinctions are nothing here unless you go out of your way to play them up, which would be disingenuous for me, to say the least.

Overall, their household seemed like a goddamned land of bounty.  A place I wanted to be; a cornucopia of weal.  With a cigarette-choked living room, but still.  They had a garden with fresh vegetables and grape vines and more.  I remember eating cheerios with sugar, sometimes sliced bananas or strawberries on it, and raisin bran.  There are two major raisin brans in the US – Post and Kellogg brands.  Kellogg has sugar crusted into the wrinkles of the raisins, Post does not.  I got the good shit.

Why are so many of these memories about grapes?  As small kids we were given snack foods a lot, and one was these tiny boxes of raisins.  The brand was Sun-Maid, and it was the first word I can remember sounding out backwards.  Diam-nus.  Take that, normalcy!

And in the smokatorium, where I hardened up my lungs a bit, I got to watch a largesque color TV in one of those stands with the wicker screens on either side.  A lot of wood paneling back then, chonky wood furniture in olive or forest green, tchotchkies and decor that were utterly lacking in our slum.  The curtains were always bright with sun.  49ers games which bored me, TV and movies which entertained.  As I recall Kung Fu and Man from Atlantis were easy enough to track, but the plot of Flash Gordon didn’t make any sense to me.  Didn’t matter; everybody in the movie seemed like they were having a good time, and the theme song ruled.  One time on the porch I was hanging out with the kids and we were all singing that theme with the “bump bump bump bump” beats, and interjected some hiccups and burps to much hilarity.  “Flash hiccup burp Ah-Aaaah!  Savior of the Universe!”  That porch had some kind of deciduous tree, not hugely tall but with leaves that looked gigantic to me.

In most of my memories there, no other siblings are around.  Why was that?  Was I usually sent there when I was ill, to be tended without spreading the disease to the others?  Were some memories formed before my brother left the crib?  Was my sister being kept away while I was not, to avoid attention that I would be presumed to avoid on the basis of my assigned gender’s anatomy?  Was I being watched while my sister was attending preschool but I wasn’t quite old enough yet?  Let’s say it’s the last one.  It’s the most probable, thankfully.

On Flash Hiccup Burp occasion, my sister and brother were there, along with some unspecified neighbor or cousin – a girl taller than me.  This was one of a few girls that fascinated me in ways I didn’t get yet, and whose memory somehow escaped me so hard.  I don’t remember her name or even her hair color, just that I was intrigued.  Maybe wasn’t getting to be around kids other than my siblings much at that point.

I remember being alone looking at the clock on the wall.  It took so long for me to figure out how to tell time on a non-digital clock.  I was watching the second hand and imagining I was watching minutes speed by at some wild rate, felt like I was expanding my consciousness lol.

I remember all the ash trays and the main brand being Marlboro, in brown or in white and orange, both with gold foil near the filter, and a tiny little coat of arms.  At night when I couldn’t sleep, looking into grainy darkness, I found when I try to focus, a tiny spot of the grains at the center of my focus seem to sharpen and intensify.  I would in these situations remember that coat of arms, and imagine the grains to be wildly oscillating heraldry.

The class disparity between my parents and grandparents had us kids complaining a lot, like, why can’t we have better things?  Maybe you could just leave us with them.  That would be cool, right?  No?  Weh.  Anyway, class war now.

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content warnings:  child sex abuse mention tho i don’t go into any detail at all, child neglect and abuse, poverty, violence.

In this big post I tried to say everything I can remember about all the places I’d lived as a child, and as many places as that was, there may be some pretty big gaps.  Life isn’t a story with a three act structure and a cool hook.  Though one can tease it into something resembling that, I’m just trying to get it all out, bit by bit, before the dust of time blows over it all.  Before I start to forget who and where I am – to the extent that I am anything, which is an occasional issue for me.

In that post I said I would expand on those entries individually.  Better nate than lever.  I approach the task…

In the beginning, I was born into a housing project in suburban California.  My father reenlisted in the army and hauled us between another few states, but we came back to land in the same shitty spot, and all my earliest memories were there.  I didn’t know it was a project until recently, having a conversation with my dad.

My dad recently told me for the first time that when I was a toddler, my sister had shut me into a footlocker and was being secretive about where I was.  He said I could have suffocated, might have been an early hint of her antisocial personality disorder.  That might be a dramatic take on it, and I do not remember the incident at all.

Seemed like any of dozens of places I’ve lived.  Beige carpet, cottage cheese texture walls, popcorn ceiling.  The closer we got to the nineties the more every interior light fixture became titty domes, but back then in the middle o’ Cali, they were frosted glass squares with an organic bulge in the middle.  The open sides collected more flies than titty lights.

I don’t remember the layout very well, but maybe the dining room faced an interior courtyard to the east, the bedroom I shared with my brother faced west and was south of the entrance.  I feel like it was the ground floor and while there were two story buildings in the complex, this wasn’t one of them.  The dining room and kitchen would have shared a cheap linoleum floor with optional cigarette burns and cracks.  I don’t recall ever seeing a cockroach, but it may have been the feebleness of crawling out of infancy hobbling my senses – I cannot imagine such a place not having roaches.

The euphemism for kids doing weird sexual crap is “playing doctor” and some amount of that happened there.  The nature of it, in combination with later information, suggests to me that my older sister may have been sexually abused at an extremely young age, and it gave her ideas.  We weren’t even in school yet when that happened, at least I wasn’t.  It might have been in preschool for her.  My dad is a piece of shit scumbag, but not that flavor.

I remember my dad singing a drinking song when we were there.  Only one part of it.  “Beer, beer, beer, said the sergeant, merry men are we;  For there’s none so fair that they can compare with the airborne infantry.”  There were artifacts of his time in the army – duffel bags, fatigues.  I might have seen him in uniform once.  He wasn’t fat yet, but he seemed like a giant, like king kong compared to me.  I never did get as manly-looking as him, which I can be thankful for as I’m more transfeminine now*.  Dude looks like Herman Munster with big gorilla hands.  Jack Torrance hairline to match his creepy demeanor.

There’s a photograph of me from that time.  I’m wearing a magenta coat and turning around in my seat, looking down.  Maybe there was a bird on the ground.  Behind me, at an outdoor restaurant table under an umbrella, my dad was drinking a bottle of michelob while four or five empties sat on the table in front of him.  Think he had a suitably 70s-80s moustache.  Dook dook, little boozehound.  Sweet dreams.

I remember I had a little green ensemble with Richard Simmons length shorts and matching t-shirt, with blue and white stripes down the side.  I liked the material, a kind of fake velvety stuff but not shiny.  There’s another picture of me with my adult teeth starting to come in, the overbite fully developed.  It propped my mouth open and I looked pretty damn dorky until I learned more self-awareness around ten and forced my lips shut until they stuck like that.  In that picture I was smiling but had extreme eyebags.  Maybe it was taken on the day I learned about daylight savings time and was certain it was a bad joke.

As I mentioned in the other post, the project was next to some golden fields of wheat, or some other crop.  I saw a tumbleweed in the parking lot once; I saw lightning strike in a field in broad daylight.  I learned what hail is.

I learned what sickness is.  One morning I projectile vomited my breakfast cereal, forming a lifetime memory.  It was in that place I contracted the chicken pox, with feverish delirium, itching, the usual – leaving silvery white scars on my body.  I don’t remember any cool fever dreams, unfortunately, only the itching, and being too exhausted to move.  Sleeping propped up so I could breathe, losing track of day and night.

I must have learned to read and write during that time, but I could not read cursive writing yet.  I remember drawing a bunch of loops on paper to emulate how my mother wrote.  I have been told it was my sister who taught me to read, and that tracks – my parents were neglectful.

With any sort of fault, it’s different from person to person.  Some neglectful parents starve their children to death, some just turn a blind eye to mental illness and serious issues while being seemingly supportive in other ways.  My mom managed to not kill us, to generally nourish us, but we were getting skin conditions and bad hygiene habits that would haunt us for a long time.  My dad was putting the whole job of parenting on her, while he was having alcohol and drug issues.  So even with antisocial personality disorder developing, my sister must’ve felt like teaching me was a fun thing to do with her time, made her feel big, and therefore I’m literate.

We had a TV back then and the only thing I can really remember watching at home is Dukes of Hazzard in its initial run.  I probably watched Sesame Street and cartoons, but I don’t remember doing that at home.  Happened somewhere else, maybe grandparents’ house.  I know that’s where I saw Flash Gordon, Kung Fu, and Man from Atlantis.  Saw some westerns I can’t remember, some football games.  I don’t remember any specific books from that time.  I do remember the radio was that barfy saccharine late 70s early 80s guff.  Sing it with a perm and rhinestones on your evening gown or lapels.

A grandmother made us quilts with our names and dates of birth on them.  Mine was chiefly yellow with lavender embroidery for the name, black squares with a citrus fruit motif.  It got pretty beat up and some purple bubble gum permanently adhered before it was retired.  I feel like my brother had a light blue “security blanket,” like Linus in Peanuts, but this could be mistaking comics for real life.

I didn’t think about being a middle child much, as a thing, but I did identify with those sardonic characters, the exasperated calm at the center of the wacky circumstance, like Charlie Brown and Kermit the Frog.  I was reading the Sunday comics, tho I didn’t understand a lot of what they were talking about.  I liked the art style on Tank McNamara, but had no effin idea what the sportball jokes were about.

I remember my brother sleeping in a crib and some kinda fuss about when he stopped.  I remember not thinking anything much of the fact my sister was from a different father and was biracial.  Maybe kids are less prejudiced without bad influences, maybe it’s because she was one year older and therefore The Boss, or maybe it’s because she unmistakably did look like us – just with brown eyes, coffee-colored skin, and loose brown curls.

One time when we were outdoors at night, I was playing with a toy gun and tried to throw it to my brother, and it hit her close to the eye, cut her skin.  The parents insisted I apologize and I distinctly remember feeling it made no sense to do so when no ill intent was involved.  They did not successfully explain to me that recklessness is as much something to apologize for as maliciousness, just made me feel like I had to eat shit for no reason.  Is there no communication in this household?  Thereafter toy guns were not allowed.

I’m gonna do a separate post for the grandparents’ house, I think.  And another for excursions, another for school.  Got a few more things to say here and it’s already run long.

I remember my dad combing my hair after a bath and asking which side I wanted it parted on.  I didn’t know what that meant and said both?  He said ok haha and ran the comb over my head on both sides, one after the other.  With his big-ass gorilla hands, that caused me pain.  I was genuinely mad, which I’m sure amused him more.  The things we remember the best in life are humiliations and pain, generally.

And names?  When I was a child I remembered names very well.  On some occasion I was left to play at the apartment of a boy named Dennis Kessler.  Only name I remember between then and elementary school tho.  He was blond (I was too at that time) and not too rude.  He had a lot of toy cars, which I was impressed by.  He had a toy truck where you could stick cars in the back of it, and that was fun.  Toy cars were more likely to be metal at that time, tho some were plastic as well.  I feel like this was a situation where I was being stashed so my mom could fuck off and do something bad, but who knows?

Last thing of note here was my very earliest memory – getting punched in the nose when arguing over a swing.  I would have been three or four, the boy much bigger.  First of many bloody noses in youth, tho the only one I can recall being directly caused by violence.  I have a deviated septum, which could well be from that incident.  I had a dim recollection there were adults in the background who did not care.  Recently my father told me they were Hell’s Angels.  If your beak is gonna be fucked up for life, might as well be from a Hell’s Angel baby.

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* this feels unfair to trans gals with very masculine faces.  not sure the best way to express this without triggering someone’s gender dysphoria, but i wanted to express where i am on that, for myself.  to most i’m sure i also look frankensteiny, and in alternate world where i’m not with my husband, i would totally get with another frankenstein girl.  but few of us would want to be her.  i just recognize tha struggle?