That is the dark side of FB. There is, mercifully, the bright side, the part that I love - being able to connect with friends from all facets of my life, even though we are scattered all over the globe. In my first Stitch Fix post, I referenced my friend, Katie, several times. While she calls me her oldest friend in the best sense of the term, I cannot return the favor because FB has allowed me to reconnect with Amy, who lived down the street from me when I was little little and was my best friend until I turned seven and we moved away. I actually have a post about that street that I haven't published yet - but I'm getting ahead of myself.
As I resurrect this blog, part of my motivation is to write down stories for my daughter so she will always have them. Doing it publicly like this will allow other players in these stories to add their perceptions and reminiscences, if they so choose. And it is because of FB (and the internet in general, obviously) that they will be able to do this. I started this conversation with Katie a couple of days ago, as I was writing the Stitch Fix entry, and I told her that I would start this Wednesday. So here we are. It's now Friday as it took me a couple of days to write it all.
I need to flip back to the political thing for just a sec, though. One of the popular motifs these days is that there is "real" America ('Murica) and then there is the rest of us - the lefty liberal, do gooder, communist, atheist, freedom haters who are out to destroy this country. Ugh. I will freely admit to being many of the epithets thrown at me and I wear them proudly. But it doesn't mean I hate the United States or freedom or even Christians. It doesn't mean I am not a "real" American - can we please note for a moment that the title of this whole blog is Apple Pie for Dessert? I love apple pie, I go to baseball games, and I had what was probably a very typical American childhood in the 1970's.
See how it came back around?
While I have tasked Katie with writing the actual story of how we met because she just tells it better than I do - I can tell you it involved catching caterpillars, woolly bears to be exact. When you touch those suckers, they curl up into a ball and look just like tribbles from "Star Trek."Katie and I were two years apart (we still are - duh - but somehow the age gap doesn't seem so meaningful as it did then); although we played together for many, many years, in my mind I am always nine and she is seven - fourth and second grades, respectively. This makes her utterly fascinating to my daughter who is currently nine. I watch my daughter now and while there is much more girl drama than I ever had at that age, I am still envious of the ease with which children can form friendships. A simple "do you want to play" and they are off and running, which was exactly how Katie and I proceeded. We both loved to read, adored music, and had vivid imaginations that we gave free rein to at every available opportunity. We spent the bulk of every summer outside, exploring the woods that ran through our back yards and culminated at the end of the cul de sac in a forest that seemed huge at the time. The cul de sac (or turnaround, as we called it then) is no longer there; when I was in high school, a road was built to connect our neighborhood with the one above it. But looking at Google maps, it appears that the woods are still alive and well - and I just did some more googling and learned something I never, ever knew - those woods actually have a name! Three Falls Woods...because, as I was about to point out, once you got inside the woods and followed the right trail, you came to the falls. We didn't go all the way out to the falls every time we went on the trails - my memory is that they were a hang out spot for teenagers at the time. I definitely remember seeing a beer ball or two when we would go!
The creek that the falls fed into ran behind the houses across the street from mine and flooded at least twice that I can remember when I lived there. The big one was in October 1981, seventh grade. I remember it started in the night and my dad came and woke us all up to see. My sister, who is four years older, thought he was waking her up to go to school so she showered and did her hair and got dressed and everything before she realized what was going on. She was pissed. I just thought it was cool. The next day, Katie and I met up and put garbage bags around our legs to wade in the water. A news truck came by and filmed us and we DID get on the air briefly. When we returned to school, someone asked me about it and was quite scornful about the garbage bags...I wasn't cool then and I'm not cool now. What can you do? This is a video compilation of news footage from the flood. However, we are not in it. I guess it wasn't Channel 3 that came by. And there seems to be a lot more footage of East Syracuse than Manlius, but it's still interesting.
Most of the time, the creek was pretty tame. We played in it and around it. There was a lot of shale in the creek, which was fun to hit with another rock and watch slice apart in a way that rocks didn't seem like they should do. Often in our outdoor adventures, we were joined by our friend, Jeremy, who lived across the street from me. They say the average person eats a pound of dirt a year - I'm fairly certain the three of us ate more than our fair share growing up. I don't think we were ever clean during the summer.
Indoors, Katie and I were enchanted by many things, among them: music, books, Muppets, Atari, Legos, Darci dolls, and a new channel on our cable system, HBO. I'll get to each of these at a future time, I hope, because they all deserve their time on the stage. But I have to say that music is my most enduring memory as it formed the framework around which we built so many of our adventures. We played most often at her house, which was a super groovy split level built in 1966, according to Zillow. The stereo and her parents' awesome record collection lived on the lower level and we spent hours upon hours listening to music, lip synching to the songs (dying of embarrassment when her brother would catch us), and weaving elaborate tales that incorporated the songs into something we just called "The Game."
"The Game" had no fixed plot line or rules. We could play it indoors or out, with or without music (although I always thought it was better with music). Our roles varied, depending on what we were obsessed with at the time. For one period of time, it was crucial that Aslan, from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, play a role and we probably fought over who got to be Lucy and who got to be Susan (it's always better to be Lucy. Always.) We really liked Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan for a while. As we got a little older and fell in love with magazines like Teen Beat and Tiger Beat, our focus shifted more to pop culture figures and we would become Olivia Newton-John and Catherine Bach or the two girls from ABBA. We were rarely the celebrities living their regular lives (and by rarely, I mean never), but instead were having grand adventures that were usually influenced by books or movies. Some I can recall are Jaws and The Omen (we can talk about the inappropriate entertainment we consumed at another time, but I should point out here that we discovered the soundtrack to Hair at an age where none of it made sense and we tried to look the words up in the dictionary and it STILL didn't make sense...which didn't stop us from adoring it and singing it at the top of our lungs). And as I said, this was always better with music and we always found a way to work the songs into the narrative. Because when you are about to be eaten by a 20 foot great white, you should sing! Clearly, we anticipated Disaster! A Musical by about 40 years.
This is merely a start. But you have to start somewhere, right? Memory is a funny, tricky thing and I am sure I am misremembering things and others can feel free to clarify. I am also sure there are many things I am forgetting and I hope, as I said above, that others will share their stories as well.
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