Jan 19 2008
First memories
It’s no secret that my memory for nostalgia isn’t the strongest two, in the by four, in the house. I distinctly remember toys behind one of my neighbors couches and the smell of old age. Va ugly I remember being at a families house across the way and the three girls they produced. Later those girls would become my step sisters. I enjoyed playing with them and I was more than happy to be a fashion victim for their transvestite en devours. Perhaps that’s why my father has a fear of me being gay. The lip stick was not in the right place. I was a child without even the faintest idea of sinfulness, let alone the concept of deviant behavior. Swinging from the weeping willow was just as interesting as wearing the cloths of Barbie.
I remember being in my dad’s cinder block garage and googling over his motor bike. I still have the scare on the back of my hand from touching the piping hot exhaust. I’m sure I was blamed for my crazy careless behavior. I’ve assumed responsibility beyond my years from the very beginning. When I touched the symbol of the Nation State, my patriarch took pride. But these photo enhanced memories don’t even come close to my first mental visual memory. That belongs to the craw Dad.
This is a crawdad. It’s a crab like thingy; a bottom feeder. They are my first memory. You might think this a strange thing to remember with all the tops and toys a young middle class man like myself was afforded, but I assure you it is not. Yes, they do look like they were spawned from a class C Japanese horror movie, but then again, so do most of the creepy crawling things.
I remember the exorcizing entrapment. An active 4 year old hunter doesn’t wait for the crawdads to walk about but instead actively lifts rocks that defy gravity in their reduced weight state in water. When a rock reveals a prime suspect the trick is bait and trap. You see, if you try to catch these little devils from the top or front a systematic response is triggered and the crawdad’s tail convulses and sends it at the speed of light in a reverse direction. Therefor, the hunter splits into a team. One hand is open ready to snare the crawdad from behind in the path of least resistance, while the other hand works ever so carefully to trigger the reaction so that the crawdad places itself in the trap hand.
Once that is done, the biology lessons begin. I love my childhood.
