Moving Polaroids Part III
I considered telling you about the first beer I ever drank in my life (Miller Pony Bottle) while fishing with my father and listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Steve Miller jamming Fly Like an Eagle on 8-track from the open doors of my father's pick-up.
It crossed my mind to tell about how my father convinced me that rubber gloves would prevent me from getting shocked from an electric cattle fence, but those are other stories for other times.
What I'll tell you in this last installment of Moving Polaroids is one of my earliest memories. When I was five, we lived in a small, run down house in Sparks, Maryland. Times were very tough and while my mother worked nights, my father worked swing shift. Often, they would meet on a parking spot along Route 83 and just pass me, still in my pajamas, from one car to the other.
But this one particular morning, I was home, standing on the front porch while my parents said their good-byes. My father was heading out to work and even though the sun was shining, there was a light drizzle coming down. The morning had an odd light to it and there was a thin low mist hovering beyond the house. My father took a drink from his coffee cup and handed it to me. His mug was that old school drippy brown style, thick-handled and too heavy for my young hands, but I always got the last sip (hmmmm... perhaps THAT'S where my coffee addiction came from? Thanks Dad, I love you for it).
I can't tell you what my parents were talking about; grown-up things I suppose. Probably discussing moving elsewhere or that I needed some new sneakers or where the money for the next electric bill was going to come from.
But while they talked, I held my now empty mug out into the drizzle and caught some sun-touched rain drops in it. When I took a drink of rainwater, my mother, as mothers do, lightly scolded me for drinking it.
And my father just smiled at me. He leaned in and kissed my mother good-bye and smiled at me again before he went off to work. I don't know if he remembers that or not but I often wonder what he was thinking that day.
***
Thanks for staying with me while I walked down Memory Lane for a while. This was fun and I hope, at the very least, it stirred up some happy memories for you as well.
There'll be a mini-update later this week, but right now I need... NEED to dive into some work-related nastiness.
Be good.
b
It crossed my mind to tell about how my father convinced me that rubber gloves would prevent me from getting shocked from an electric cattle fence, but those are other stories for other times.
What I'll tell you in this last installment of Moving Polaroids is one of my earliest memories. When I was five, we lived in a small, run down house in Sparks, Maryland. Times were very tough and while my mother worked nights, my father worked swing shift. Often, they would meet on a parking spot along Route 83 and just pass me, still in my pajamas, from one car to the other.
But this one particular morning, I was home, standing on the front porch while my parents said their good-byes. My father was heading out to work and even though the sun was shining, there was a light drizzle coming down. The morning had an odd light to it and there was a thin low mist hovering beyond the house. My father took a drink from his coffee cup and handed it to me. His mug was that old school drippy brown style, thick-handled and too heavy for my young hands, but I always got the last sip (hmmmm... perhaps THAT'S where my coffee addiction came from? Thanks Dad, I love you for it).
I can't tell you what my parents were talking about; grown-up things I suppose. Probably discussing moving elsewhere or that I needed some new sneakers or where the money for the next electric bill was going to come from.
But while they talked, I held my now empty mug out into the drizzle and caught some sun-touched rain drops in it. When I took a drink of rainwater, my mother, as mothers do, lightly scolded me for drinking it.
And my father just smiled at me. He leaned in and kissed my mother good-bye and smiled at me again before he went off to work. I don't know if he remembers that or not but I often wonder what he was thinking that day.
***
Thanks for staying with me while I walked down Memory Lane for a while. This was fun and I hope, at the very least, it stirred up some happy memories for you as well.
There'll be a mini-update later this week, but right now I need... NEED to dive into some work-related nastiness.
Be good.
b
posted by Bob at 2/02/2009
2 Comments:
Those were some cool memories you shared, Bob. They definitely stirred up some good ones for me that I had forgotten until now. Reading your memories as a child got me thinking about some of my own. Thanks for that. It's fun to think of cool memories that we have, it helps us to realize why we are the adults we've become.
Naa...All I get are memories of playing on the electric fence, getting chased by a donkey, and smashing my cousins skull bc we pushed him out of the lil red wagon. All funny and we can totally go over lunch tomorrow and find another fence. This time you get to touch it first. (dirty dirty)
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