Childhood – Page 2

I Remember … A Boomer Tribute

Filed Under: Reflections, Stories · June 4, 2009 · 4 Comments ·

I remember …

Playing outside after school, roaming the neighbourhood at will and only having to be home for tea.

Long trips in the car, sleeping in beds made up for us in the back of the station wagon. There were no seat belts in those days.

Watching The Lone Ranger, Wagon Train and Rin Tin Tin on TV, translating the stories into all the Cowboys and Indians games we played with the kids in our street.

Mr Magoo, My Favourite Martian, The Beverley Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie … and Richard Greene as Robin Hood.

The Mr Whippy Van and melting soft icecream in cones, with a Cadbury Flake chocolate protruding from the top.

Adults tapping their feet impatiently behind us, when we kids took ages to choose sixpence worth of mixed lollies from behind the glass counter at the milk bar.

Working proudly as an ‘ink monitor’. Mixing powder and water to make the ink then filling the inkwells in the desks

Building cubby houses, go karts and defendable forts out of boxes, sticks and other scraps we found around the yard.

When men first miraculously landed on the moon. A couple of hundred of us packed into the school hall, watching in wonder the grainy images on a black and white TV.

Seeing the Vietnam marches on TV. Wishing I could be there too, but my parents wouldn’t let me because I was too young.

Town hall dances, with their customary ‘progressive dance’ when the back of my dress became damp from sweaty hands that steered me around the dance floor

Purple brushed denim jeans, lime green and purple floral shirt and platform shoes.

And for all of you who also remember these things …

… here’s an amusing update on our lives! :)

Music and Memories

Filed Under: Reflections, Stories · April 26, 2009 · 2 Comments ·

This morning I heard the snatch of an old 70s song on the radio, and I was 18 again, in my first year at University – exploring new horizons, making new friends and mourning the loss of an early love.

Music holds a sure magic. It transports us through time, connects us with other people, helps to heal wounds, makes us laugh, makes us cry and feeds the soul. And there are some tunes that, when we hear them, take us back to a certain time or place with crystal-clear vividness.

My own earliest memories include my mother’s voice singing old English ballads to send me to sleep. Songs such as Oh, No John, No John, No John, No, Cockles and Mussels, and The North Wind Doth Blow.

My father was a trad jazz fan, and played the piano. Never professionally, but with a passionate love of music that stayed with him throughout his life. So my other early lullabies were tunes like Tiger Rag, St James’ Infirmary Blues and many more. And the first song I remember learning to sing as a small child was Ragtime Cowboy Joe!

[And what a delightfully quirky collection of videos I found on the web, when searching for links to all those songs. :-) ]

Indeed, music was so much a part of my dad’s life that even the stories he told of the six years he spent in the British Navy in WWII were often centred around the times he got to play the piano.

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On Time and Tesseracts

Filed Under: Featured, Journeys, Stories · April 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment ·

Recently, thanks to Daniel Brenton, I was reminded again of Madeleine L’Engle‘s book for children, A Wrinkle in Time – one that intrigued me as a child. Daniel also wrote a wonderful piece on Madeleine L’Engle and A Wrinkle in Time on his blog.

The title of the book refers to the ability to travel through space and time by means of a ‘tesseract’. This is described as a ‘fold’ in the space-time continuum – as if a piece of cloth were folded so two segments usually some distance from one another are adjoined.

The idea of being able “to tesseract” (for some reason the concept stayed with me as a verb) has continued to fascinate me.

As a child, I thought wistfully of the tesseract on many a weary walk home from school. Even as an adult, it’s jumped into my mind when there when there have been far too many things to do in too short a time. The idea of being able to complete different tasks synchronously within parallel universes definitely holds great appeal!

For the curious who are unfamiliar with L’Engle’s books … the dictionary definition of a tesseract is the generalisation of a cube to four dimensions – a hypercube. It comes from Greek – tésseres meaning four and aktís meaning ray.

A web search for “tesseract” produces a large number of maths and science websites, amongst others, as it is primarily a mathematical concept.

However I discovered it is also the name of a progressive rock band from the San Francisco Bay area, currently on ice, and of an Australian company called Tesseract Research Laboratories which was an artistic collaboration exploring electronica + visual media within environments and performance, from 1997 until 2004.

Amazing! I’m sure you’ll be as fascinated as I was by that that information. :)

But for me, under the influence of L’Engle’s books, the whole concept of the tesseract remained as a way of being in two places at once – of exploring parallel universes in space and time.

I find myself reflecting that perhaps the fantastical and magical sense I had about the tesseract as a child has been transferred in adulthood to discovering magical parallel universes in different people and places. That fascinating experience of both similarity and “otherness”. And who knows, maybe web travelling is also a kind of tesseract into a parallel universe? :)