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Now Playing: Local H, Bound for the Floor
Topic: History
I was born on November 26 1968, I'm a sagitarius but my rising sign is libra & I'm a lot more like a libra than a sag. I am however fairly easygoing, laid back & cheerful so I am a little bit of a sag. My earliest memories are of the crib I had in Melrose, It was in an alcove with either a dresser or a wall at the head & a window at the foot, Melrose is a city mostly absorbed into Boston now. I remember seeing lightning streak across the sky & seeing the buildings in contrast to the sky. I remember watching neighbor kids help thier father pick up glass & trash when I was supposed to be napping (or maybe it was early in the morning)they had filled a whole wheelbarrow full & there was a LOT of glass, I remember the sun glinting on the glass. I know the landlord lived below us & mrs landlord baby sat me & my mother wore a wig to work sometimes becuase I remember it upset me to see her wearing the wig. I'd already be down at the landlords when she was going out the door to work & I'd go to give her a hug but then I didn't like the wig. I know I was an insecure, whiny child, we have audio tapes. I remeber the pantry had a diamond shaped window & there were more rooms than we used in the apartment, my mother had a sewing room & my father had a den plus my bedroom their bedroom & the living room, kitchen etc. the building had the landlords place & annother apartment either above us or beside us, I'm not really sure which. the stairs were very dark wood & the place was unusual in that it had an upstairs & a downstairs. when I was 2 going on 3 we moved from Melrose to Rockland, to live in my mother's fathers ancestral home, the house was built in the 1830s by his grandfather & had been in the family ever since. my grandparents had taken a mortgage on the house (which was owned outright at the time) to renovate it & make it up to date & habitable, before they did the work they did there was a lightbulb in the center of every room & if you wanted to plug anything in you ran a cord from the plug which was in the lightbulbs screw in base. the room we had for a dining room was the original kitchen & the kitchen was a summer kitchen, they added on with a fireplace, a brick area beside it for the stove etc. the dining room had a big picture window & corner cupboards. we had double living rooms, my grandparents living room had built in book shelves lining one wall & my mother's living room had free standing bookshelves across one whole wall too.. one thing everyone in my family had in common was a deep love of books, my father's den in this new house had 2 walls of bookshelves. Of course the legend goes that my uncle built the bookshelves in that room for himself & then my father took it over, I'm not sure exactly what the true story there is, from what I saw my father & uncle (mothers brother) always got along, but I've heard from a couple sources that they did not & could not, in fact, stand each other. But of course though the person who told me this considered himself a friend of my fathers I know my father did not consider this guy a friend so who knows what the truth of the matter is. I know all my uncles thought my father was odd because he was anti credit cards & would buy a car & use it until it died & then buy annother one, never had car payments until the last few years of his life, my father. Growing up in the house in Rockland was great in some ways, terrible in others, I was quickly alienated from the neighborhood kids, my mother didn't like them, I belive she found them coarse & I know she especially did not like how the mothers yelled for the children at dinner time. I'm more like those mothers than I am like my own mother now. But then I spent so many years living my life in direct opposition to her life that it could hardly be any other way! we had a yard which was aproximately an acre of open space & annother 9 acres of woods, one of my earliest memories there was when lightning hit a tree in the woods about 10 feet into the woods behind the house, I don't remember the noise, though my mother says it shook the house, I just remember she put on her boots & jacket & went out to look & left me in the kitchen by myself during a thunder storm (thunder storms were not something I liked untill I was older- now I love to watch them & I discovered when my youngest was born that my mother Hates them) as I said we had a fireplace & my father cut the lightning struck wood up & we burned it in the fireplace, I remember them remarking on how well it burned. The yard had a little rock wall by the barn & below it were raspberry bushes, hyacinths, daffodils & crocuses it was a big deal in mid march to late march (this was massachusetts after all) to go out there & look for the flowers coming up. It was about the only time my mother went outside & by the time I was 11 or so she didn't do that either. just got out a vase when I brought her the flowers that I picked out there. Not much of an outdoors person my mother. Even when she goes to the beach to watch the waves she does it from the seat of her car not the wall or the sand.
Many of my earliest memories are of the yard, there was a 15 by 15 square of lilac trees (taller than the house) behind the kitchen & between the brick wall that was the end of the kitchen & the lilacs there was a path, the side by the lilacs had a row of large rocks lined up on it, I played that this was my kitchen a lot, then in the lilacs, between them & the barn there was annother path that led down to the woods & the cart path thru them. in the lilacs off this path was a large (2x3 foot) flat stone, I would set acorn caps etc on it & pretend it was my store & the stone was the counter I have since found out that the stone was the step to the outhouse & where I sat to run my store was the filled in hole where the outhouse emptied into. no wonder those lilacs thrived so in that spot! I had a swing set but the tree behind it was well liked by the gypsy moths so I wouldn't swing on the swings much in summer, I was allways afraid my hair would get stuck in their nests.
My brother Ben was born in 1973 when I was 4 & 1/2. we got along pretty well & were really close especially as we got older because of course, we were homeschooled & for 6 hours a day had no one else to talk to but each other & my mother. (sometimes my father too. he was unemployed a lot of the time we were homeschooled) My Father was a pretty quiet guy, he was into fly fishing, jazz, reading & photography. he liked to get stoned but didn't drink to excess.
He was supposed to be a salesman but he was not too good at it, he was too nice & never seemed to pressure anyone, if you wanted to buy he'd be happy to sell it to you but he would not twist your arm, as he called it. He got most of his sales by asking & the person was interested (I guess) He definitley seemed to like being home more than working, but doesn't everyone? My mother did a few part time jobs when I was in school then when my brother was old enough for something more than preschool is when she started teaching us at home. She took a job at night so she could work & be home during the day for us, she was a night housemother for mentally retarded kids at a local boarding school & so she could sleep there too once the kids were asleep. Which worked out well for her & really well for me once I was a teenager! Chrissy always wanted to come to my house when we were teens because we barely had any supervision, my father was there but he was upstairs in his den & when I came home from being out I'd often have to wake him up to let him know I was home. My grandmother (widowed by then) was there 3 or 4 nights a week some of that time but was often asleep by the time I (or we) came home too. I never really abused their trust, though it was expected that thru hanging around with Chrissy I would, (at least by my mother) It was Kim she should have been worried about but that's annother story for annother day.