Exploring Childhood Memories (Again)

 The summer months often pique imaginations for kids, and there is something I wanted to share today that was of interest during my childhood.  Beginning at around the time I was 10 years old, I lived in a bit of a poverty-stricken environment.  At first, it was with my grandparents, who lived on a farm just outside the town of Augusta, WV, and they lived in an old house that had no indoor plumbing save a cold-water pump.  Also, the general isolation of my surroundings meant that as a kid I had to find ways to keep myself occupied.  A lot of it consisted of normal activities I did - I fished in the pond above the house, and also made a makeshift fort out of a small grove of trees at the edge of the yard.  The thing that fueled most of this was imagination, and mine was in overdrive in many cases.  Later, when Mom and I moved to the nearby town of Kirby, we lived in a mobile home there and also had very little at the time.  I remember the days when dinner consisted of oven-cooked French fries, fried cabbage, or fried squash, and for a long time the only meat we had was the occasional package of bacon or sliced ham we got at the store just on the other side of the yard. Imagination was my richest resource I had, as I had little else then, and I used that to my advantage. 

Most kids have vivid imaginations, as that is what actually compels them to learn and explore life.  In my case however, it was in overdrive.  Much of the imagination I had then was fueled by reading, and I read a lot!  Magazines, children's stories, and the occasional foray to the library in Romney provided me with reading material.  I particularly loved reading old issues of Readers Digest that people gave us, as well as a huge collection of old Cricket magazines a classmate in my elementary school had given me. From those, I got some ideas and did my own little projects - one was a foray into papier mache, in which I got quite good at making ducks from a clothes hanger frame draped with flour-pasted strips of old Grit newspapers I had temporarily gotten into as a sort of small business enterprise that sort of went by the wayside when I realized how much work it would take to sell them and also the fact most people didn't have an interest in them anyway. Once the newspaper was in place, I then did the same things with strips of toilet paper to make the duck look, well, like a duck.  Also, that Christmas Mom got me a chemistry set, and I used that a lot too, including an odd attempt to make perfume for a girl I had a crush on then. Although she graciously accepted my little "gift," I am thinking it probably ended up in a trash can somewhere because in all honesty who could blame her.  I also attempted to make my own cheese, and that actually had a certain level of success.  I created a tiny wheel of cheese, smaller than a Baby Bell, and after salting it and curing it more it looked like a small parmesan wheel.  I never actually ate it, but it was just cool to do.  My chemistry set and the fact I had a large bedroom to experiment in made my life somewhat more interesting, along with occasional forays to the local creek behind the house where I caught a ton of things such as baby crawfish, water pennies, tiny freshwater limpets, and the occasional big prize of a small mottled sculpin.  Those proved more challenging to catch as they were very fast, and they often were in fast-moving and deeper pools strewn with rocks in the creek. Such was life in the summers. 

Onto my more ambitious ideas, one of the things I feared most then was losing Mom - Mom drank a lot then and also smoked up to a pack of cigarettes a day, and while at that time she was in her late 30s it still was a real fear I had.  And, God forbid, I didn't want to end up with my dad and step-mother in Georgia then, although looking back that may not have been as bad as I imagined.  My survival instincts kicked in at that time and I was always plotting and thinking of an exit strategy in case something happened to Mom.  That strategy involved a sort of "base camp" in a forest somewhere (an idea I had picked up from reading one of my grandfather's old hunting books, and the duck blind plans in that piqued my interest then).  The plan I had was actually very minimalist but also to me it was somewhat sophisticated - I would build a partially-underground shelter that looked eerily like the duck blinds I was studying in the book, and then I began looking at catalogs and the various magazines given to us, and I had a plan in place!  I cannot at this point really recall every detail about those ideas, but they would make for an interesting book if they could be written down!  I was also thinking somewhat pragmatically - collecting things like sugar packets and other "convenience foods" that I would stockpile to live on.  As I look back on that now, I was a bit of a weird kid!  But, my plans got more ambitious as I moved on. 

I got this idea to start a sort of political movement based on all the history books I was reading then, and I eventually fantasized about carving out a kingdom in Brazil or someplace.  It was a pretty grandiose plan in all honesty, and by the time I was 12 I actually was trying to create a manifesto as well as a complete plan for how this was going to come together.  And, having the vivid imagination as a kid, I really thought I could pull that off!  However, within about a year or so that sort of fell by the wayside as I began to knock on the doorstep of adolescence, and I started developing more tangible interests that would later coalesce into something else.  

I was 12 when I started getting interested in music - I told that story already.  At that point my goal was to create the biggest collection of the music I liked, and it was actually a somewhat attainable goal.  Most of the recordings I acquired came via the local junk shop in nearby Rio, where I could buy records for a quarter.  By the time I reached my 14th birthday, I had a stack of a couple of hundred easily.  But, it also caused a few issues - remember those old Readers Digests we had?  I had discovered mail-order, and although I had no income to speak of then, it was easy to send a business-reply envelope and order things, and so I did.  Within a couple of years, I ended up with about 6 boxed sets of "collector's edition" recordings from Readers Digest, with no way to possibly pay for them.  Being relatively cheap at the time, the total amount for all six sets of records was about $200, something as an adult I could easily manage.  But, for a young kid with a $10 monthly allowance that came out of my dad's child support he sent us, I was in way over my head.  My dad and stepmom eventually paid for a couple of them for me as sort of an early Christmas present, but I also got a tongue-lashing from my dad about it. That leads to another part of this discussion.

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was still in my early teens, there was no internet and most communication or mail shopping was done via the old business-reply cards.  One could order just about anything then, and many places were a lot more trusting at that time than they would be later.  So, it was extremely easy to order a bunch of stuff, and the convenience made it somewhat addictive.  That was the day when vinyl records and cassettes were still the primary media, and there were also record clubs then where for a penny you could get 12 cassettes or records from clubs such as Columbia House or BMG Music Services.  What the fine print didn't say though was two things.  First, you had shipping to pay on those, and that could be as much as $10.  Second, by signing up for that, you had an obligation to buy at least two items a year, or you'd be penalized. I did manage to get several items in my collection then, but many of those were cassettes, and my rule is this - if you want music worth preserving, do NOT buy it on cassette!  I had more cassettes go kaput on me over the years than anything, and by the mid-1990s when I began to buy CDs as a young college student, I found CDs to be a more feasible format because for the most part they didn't mess up, and they also were easier to manage than huge stacks of vinyl records.  So, while it was fun to order things then, it was also easy to get in over your head, and I would learn that the hard way. 

Looking back on that, I think I was probably part of at least 3 music clubs, two book clubs, and I also got a lot of free stuff as I had access to a free religious magazine that the town store kept called The Plain Truth.  That magazine at the time was published by the Worldwide Church of God, which was founded in the 1930s by Herbert W. Armstrong.  Back then, it was essentially a heretical cult, although some years later they re-evaluated their doctrine and are thankfully now a more orthodox Evangelical Protestant church.  Everything that The Plain Truth offered was free, and I perhaps ended up with somewhere in the vicinity of 50 small booklets as well as two large books, one of which, The United States and Britain in Prophecy, promoted the bizarre and quasi-racist doctrine of Anglo-Israelism. At that time though, I actually thought I had hit the motherload, and I thought I was something with a library of free heresy.  Thankfully, in 1986 I became a Christian, and the weird, free cultic literature ended up in the garbage as I began to be properly discipled by a Godly Baptist minister.  Again, a large part of this stuff happened in my summers then, so it kept me busy.

While there are many more childhood reflections I could share, these were a few of my most memorable ones, and I do have one other one I want to share next time that entails cooking - I have always loved to cook, and that was an interest I developed at a very young age.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.