For years and years and years the family story about the birth of calasister#2, who was always known as an unusually good-natured baby, was that she was so even tempered that she had slept through her own birth.

Years and years and years later, my dad admitted that what had actually happened was that she had been born not breathing, and the doctors ensured everything was just fine within no more than a few seconds, "she must have been sleeping!" had been what he'd told my mother when she'd sleepily wondered later why the (obviously healthy) baby didn't cry at first.

One of my friends from high school made the mistake of putting her Altoids in a plastic bag. Of course they fell under the seat, were crushed, and later found by her parents.

Damn, you had altoids in high school? And just what was on your breath?

I know I must have some stories like this, but I can't think of any at the moment.

What additional evidence did you have to make you realize years later that it was coke? Or did you just decide when you were grown up that it would have been stupid for someone to put a bag of flour in a bus seat?

I found my Mom's vibrator when I was like eight years old and had no idea what it was. I was very confused...what could this thing do? Why does it buzz when I twist the base? I just shrugged and put it back in the drawer and continued my search to steal loose change from the 'rents room (I was a criminal little kid). Much later I remembered and figured out what it must have been.

5: What do you think it was?

I love stories where you only infer what must have happened years later.

This describes most of my childhood memories. Growing up in a house with only myself and a single mother who was (1) crazy (as in, badly out of touch with reality), (2) a habitual liar (sometimes merely in the fanciful sense, but often simply in the deceitful sense) left me with some very odd interpretations of events in my life. It's rare that I meditate for long on a childhood memory without thinking "wait, that doesn't make any sense... that couldn't have happened like that." Usually I'm able to peice together a sensible alternate narrative; other times, I'm left confused and just sort of discount the memories altogether.

When I was in second grade, I dug up some "hens-and-chicks" (ground covering plant thingies) from the garden and put them in a pot. I planned to take them to school. They sat in that pot on the back deck under my brother's window for months, since even then I was lazy and never bothered to take them to school. Come spring, a new plant began to grow in my pot, and this one was much more interesting than the hens-and-chicks. I called it my palm tree and I paid it a lot of special attention since it was a magical plant that had sprouted up all unexpected in my flower pot. My palm tree got bigger and bigger and I was so proud of it and would show it with great pride to anyone who visited. All the adults found my palm tree and my love for my palm tree delightful.

7- You suddenly realized what the principal was doing when he sniffed it to "identify" it?

6: I found my mother's vibrator at about that age, too, but she didn't have the decency to say "that's none of your business, stop snooping under my bed!" No, instead she said: "It's a vibrator, son. They're used to massage sore muscles. Here, let me show you." [Proceeds to massage my back and shoulders with her vibrator.]

I shudder to this day.

10: No, I just assumed he was doing a line of flour.

11: Zounds!

11 is hilarious, and 8 makes me curious.

One that comes to mind- my brother had the usual stash of older-brother pron, and when he went to college my parents tried to hide it in their closet, where of course I found it. I was sure they were just hiding it because they'd never have any use for that sort of thing.

I still remember going through an old desk in an out of the way room in the house and finding a bottle of Old Spice and this weird coin-shaped object made of a rubber-like material that could be unrolled into a tube. I thought it was fascinating and would go back to that drawer and unroll and roll the object and try to open the Old Spice (which was stuck).

It took a while to be aware enough to be extremely thankful that the object was dry.

"As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!"

11 is very funny.

My second grade teacher wasn't very happy that I tried to explain what fallopian tubes were.

I had an occasionally recurring nightmare about being chased by huge dogs across a muddy bit of farmland and then frantically banging on the farmhouse door as they closed in. I always woke up just as they leaped at me.

Some fifty years later I found out it had happened when I was three. The dogs were just playing and I didn't sustain any physical damage. I haven't had that nightmare since.

I didn't get the reference in 17 until I thought about for a second, and then I figured it out, because, you know, free dummy.

20 doesn't make any sense, but I'm distracted by all these bothersome trees screaming for no good reason.

I'd long wondered why I hated and feared clowns. I thought it was because of their unusually large feet and scary big red smiles that remind me of middle-aged women in Russia. Later I realized it probably had something to do with the time we went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.

19 is very interesting. I have some weird recurring dreams (not nightmares, mostly) that I assume are all rooted in something. I'd love to know what. I should probably talk to a therapist some day.

And neither 20 nor 21 makes any sense.

I thought I had a good idea of what 21 meant, but it was just eggs hatching.

Only years later did I realize that I couldn't actually fly as a kid.

I was going to take the kids to Disneyland over the weekend, but I had to work. So I drove them by an old burned out factory instead and said "Hey, look, Disneyland burned down."

I JUST THOUGHT I HAD SUPPLE THUMBS.

I should probably talk to a therapist some day.

I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed psychiatrist is our "friend".

Much as I love Deep Thoughts, only 27 made me laugh out loud.

Seriously, tho, this is approaching quoting Python territory, so beware.

If you think about the word mankind, it makes sense to break it up into two parts, mank and ind. What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.

30: Should we go back to Catch-22?

28: SO WHAT DO I KNOW FROM THUMBS AND WRISTS?

Bad Old GF insisted that the story of my sister's birth must be bogus, and that our parents' courthouse wedding must have been shotgun-style.

Facts: Wedding, Jan 28. Birth, Sept. 9
Official Story: Child was a month early
Flaw in Official Story: More like 6 weeks, and that still presumes a very successful honeymoon
Revisionist Story: Child was on time
Flaw in Revisionist Story: That's pretty quick to identify an unplanned pregnancy and come to a decision
Likely Truth: ????

Should we go back to Catch-22?

We need something with more indie cred. Maybe rap lyrics from ca. 1990?

Perhaps they were already planning on getting married and just happened to get pregnant right before it. That seems like the most likely explanation.

34: what about Revisionist Story B: wedding was on time as planned, but some nookie was a bit premature.

35: One time I wished I was a little bit taller. I wished I was a baller. I wished I had a girl who looked good, I would call her. Then I wished that I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat and a 64 Impala.

32: I hate it when blogs are torn apart by simple things, like chocolate-covered cotton differences of opinions.

I have a very tall cousin with huge feet; he's about eight years older than I am. When he was a teenager, and I was nine or ten, he had a job at Mcdonalds, and my father told me that his job was dressing up in the Ronald McDonald outfit and making appearances; they'd hired him because he fit the shoes. I believed this without thinking about it -- someone must make appearances as Ronald McDonald, wouldn't you think? When I was around thirty, I referred to this job of my cousin's, and got blank stares -- Dad had just been messing with my head. My cousin had actually been working the grill like any other teenager.

35/38: One of them dames was sexy as hell. I said "ooo I like your size." She said "my car's broke down and you seem real nice, would ya let me ride?" I got a car full of girls and it's going real swell. The next stop is the Eastside Motel.

Why are we doing this?

I don't get 9. What was the "palm tree," a pot plant or something? (Why did the adults let you keep it, then? If it came from your brother, was he really dumb enough to (a) plant it or let it grow there, and (b) not take it back when he found out that you had been showing it to people?)

I don't get 9. What was the "palm tree," a pot plant or something?

I immediately thought of Calliope Stephanides' crocus, if that's any help.

Brock is tweaking to a whole new era. G-funk step to Brock? I dare ya. Brock, on a whole new level, where rhythm is the bass, and the bass is the treble.

>>> basket = ['apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'orange', 'banana']
>>> fruit = set(basket) # create a set without duplicates
>>> fruit
set(['orange', 'pear', 'apple', 'banana'])
>>> 'orange' in fruit # fast membership testing
True
>>> 'crabgrass' in fruit
False

34/36- that's what happened to my younger brother and his now-ex wife- they got engaged in January, she got (unintentionally) pregnant in March, and they got married in June, so it looked a bit like a shot-gun wedding but really wasn't. (Unfortunately she soon decided that she really wasn't ready to be a mom and so mostly dumped the kid on my brother and left him.)

You ever had a girl and met her on a nice hello? You get her name and number and then you feelin' real mellow? You get home, wait a day, she's what you wanna know about? Then you call up and it's her girlfriend or her cousin's house? It's not a front (F to the R to the O to the N to the T), it's just her boyfriend's at her house (boy, that's what is scary).

You down with HEE BEE? Yeah you know me!

46: My sister and I have wondered if my parents had a pregnancy scare that turned out to be unfounded; while she was born eleven months after the wedding, so there's no ambiguity there, they got married less than four months after they met, which seems odd (and while personally I'm glad they did, was kind of a ghastly mistake considered as a marriage). No way to find out except by asking, though, and that's not going to happen.

Some fifty years later I found out it had happened when I was three. The dogs were just playing and I didn't sustain any physical damage. I haven't had that nightmare since.

My only two recurring dreams both stem from incidents like this. In my case they were things talked about around me in the 2-3 age range which I then dreamed about for years until I finally happened to mention both of them to my mother when I was 19. She explained that they were both based on real events. Real, creepy events - one recurring dream was about a man swept over a waterfall while taking pictures (happened to one of the family friends, in the Sierra backcountry, with rapids rather than a full on waterfall); the other dealt with wandering terrified and alone in a very rural house and surrounding barn & outbuildings we had lived in when I was very small, encountering pools of blood and then having to escape from a fire from structure to structure (after we moved out, the woman who lived there next brought home a genuinely crazy man who killed her and her children and then set the place on fire). Like Biohazard, I haven't had the dreams since.

There are also many, many, many stories from my childhood that only now I realize couldn't have possibly happened the way I remember them or was told them - it's what comes of having a father who is a born story-teller (in the prevarication sense).

I spend all my dough
re mi cutie
shoop shoop a doobie
like heebie-geebie

I was born 8.5 months after my parents' wedding. I've never asked.

I was present, in visible form, in my mother's womb at the wedding. That removes the need to ask.

If looks could kill, you would be a heebie
or a geebie - BANG! - what's up with that thang?
I wanna know, how does it hang?

53: Similarly, Jammies was five when his parents got married, so that is also well-understood.

I immediately thought of Calliope Stephanides' crocus, if that's any help.

I just finished that book! Like 2 nights ago.

36 seems likely, but 37 is just nuts.

51 was me, apparently subconsciously embarrassed at the mildest hint of impropriety. Now if you'll excuse me, I have the vapors.

I was present, in visible form, in my mother's womb at the wedding.

I always thought those windowed wombs were just science fiction.

cluck cluck-cluck cluck CLUCK
cluck cluck-cluck cluck CLUCK
cluck cluck-cluck mike D
CLUCK

That heebie is poison. Never trust a big tummy and a smile.

It makes me sad that I have no such stories to share of sudden revelations reached as an adult. Because I'm pretty sure it proves that I'm still too dumb to have caught on.

62: Hint: that old dog didn't really go to live on a farm with lots of fresh air and sunshine.

I always thought those windowed wombs were just science fiction.

Nope, it's just like the cows with the glass plates in their sides. Teaching science, one horrifying moment at a time!

Obligatory "womb with a view" joke.

45 is great.

I don't understand the point of 45.

63; I feel like this has been discussed here before, but we had lots of old dogs go live on farms, and to this day I think it's true. Unless veterinarians have actors they routinely send out to people's houses to pick up their dogs and lie about taking them to live on a farm (and instead take them to put them to sleep?).

So it's odd birth tales, is it?

Ah, well, my mother went to UH on a full scholarship, where she met this guy her freshman year who was a senior at the time. So she got pregnant, and I was born while my father was doing some grad student thing at OU. A coupla years later they split up, and then my father can and picked me up for a visit to where he was living in KY. Afterwards (I think) he more or less cut off all contact in a very formal letter to my mother. Seemed kind of cold.

So after rooting through some family thing (I was looking at induction and discharge papers for my grandfather), it dawned on me that my father's senior year was '66-67, so if he had not had a kid and had not got into grad school, he might well have been drafted. Of course, once he was a parent, he was exempt, so why should he care what happens afterwards? I asked my mother to clarify and she could not disagree, but apparently he did not tell her that directly. The kicker is that on his myspace page he lists himself as a 'proud parent', which I found kind of amusing, so I am the only one, so far as I know. (He has step-kids, however.)

max
['Not actually funny.']

68: Um, why would you send an old dog to live on a farm, rather than keeping them at home, if they're still healthy enough to enjoy life? Why would the farm take them? I suppose nothing's impossible, but I'm not following the business model here.

And 69: Yow. That's what we call a perverse incentive.

I assumed 45 was to 30.2.

Didn't Brock grow up in a pretty rural area? That may have played a role in the dog/farm thing.

72: Exactly.

I too am wondering at farms with multiple old dogs creaking about. Why does the farm host them?

When I was very young, I got mixed up in my mind the farms for old dogs, the Fields of Elysium, and the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm mentioned in the Snoopy cartoons----which made my older sisters' threats to send me back to the puppy farm where my parents got me a little more terrifying.

We had a very ugly and unruly mutt dog, a poodle mix of some sort, who could climb trees and chain-link fences. Because of that she got out of the yard all the time and generally drove my father nuts. Eventually she went to "live on a farm with a nice old woman". When I was visiting my folks a few years ago we asked him if he'd actually just shot Poochie, as he as always threatening to do. He insisted he had not and got quite annoyed when my mother said that she'd always figured that he'd shot Poochie, too. Of course we still think he did it. My wife found it all very amusing.

Why does the farm host them?

To help keep the foxes away from the chickens?

Of course the real place to send an old or unwanted dog is not to a farm but to an island. Dog Island!
http://www.thedogisland.com/

42: Of course it was a pot plant. The adults let me keep it because they thought it was hilarious that I was so proud of the thing. (And my parents didn't smoke or anything and were way [and in my dad's case, way, way,] too old to be hippies.) Family theory on how the plant came to grow in my flowerpot: Flowerpot lived under brother's window; brother would lean out window to roll. Seeds fell. Alternate theory: Brother planted it there to amuse himself. The poor plant met a terrible end, when, having watched an episode of Three's Company that showed me what a pot plant looked like, I freaked out and disavowed ownership. I was basically waiting for the cops to kick in the door.

I suppose it could be like a retirement home for people -- you give us money, we take care of your dog -- which is a plausible business model, but the role of the pet-owner is still kind of inexplicable. Dogs don't, IME, have a long period where they're too sick to live at home, but not yet dead. And if they're not too sick to live at home, what're you getting rid of a perfectly good dog for?

Brock, I think they put your dogs to sleep.

Old dogs are slow, you see. So you have to have a couple dogs stationed in each of the directions around the chicken coop.

18: My second grade teacher wasn't very happy that I tried to explain what fallopian tubes were.

I explained episiotomies to my second grade teacher and my whole class. The teacher was apparently rather interested, as she was quite young and had no children herself and hadn't heard of this before. Or perhaps she was horrified and my parents lied to me...

Everything I knew about childbirth at the time I'd learned from a copy of a Sheila Kitzinger book my mother had been keeping on a low shelf. It wasn't until very recently that I realised why I'd found this book so great: it was written for a very wide audience, which meant that while its concepts weren't really targeted at an eight-year-old and neither was its vocabulary, its writing style was accessible to me. If I have children, popularising books are going to do my childrearing for me too.

Based on 69.1, I can only assume that max is Barack Obama ("living in KY"? KY = Kenya, obvs.).

Don't listen to Summers, Barack! Do what's in your Secret MuslinSocialist heart!

When I was twelve, I was reading the Newsweek 'now-it-can-be-told' about the 1988 election, where Roger Ailes yelled something about bestiality. When I asked my Dad what that meant, he told me without blinking, "the reality of the best."

I was a dumb kid.

I always just put my old dogs in an envelope and send them to Cash for Dogs.

That wasn't cash, M/tch. It was your mother's vibrator.

When I asked my Dad what that meant, he told me without blinking, "the reality of the best."

Good work, KlugDad!

88: The best part: my Dad was/is a 1st-gen immigrant and read to improve his English. He had the word underlined in red, which meant that he didn't know it and looked it up in the dictionary.

It took Fleur to point out to me, when I was well into my thirties, the obvious homosexuality of at least five members of my (extended) family. The thought just never occurred to me.

But who put the dogs to sleep, LB? People showed up at our door to take the dogs. Sometimes with little kids, who said "yeah! doggy!" And it was different people every time. (And we always used the same vet.) Were they employyes of our vet? Friends of my mother (who I'd never met before)? I just can't imagine my mother pulling off so elaborate a deception.

The going rate for mutts was $10-15 bucks, if I recall correctly. Some people didn't want to pay that, but were happy to take free dogs.

And most of our dogs weren't deathbed old when we got rid of them, anyway. They were usually somewhere between 4-6, I'd say. That's about the time my mother would give up trying to housebreak them, and move on to another dog.

I should note that we owed about two dozen dogs in the 18 years I lived with my mother. Most only lasted a few years with us (and we usually had two at a time).

I just can't imagine my mother pulling off so elaborate a deception.

That's hard to square with 11.

91: That sounds awful. But seriously, the unbelievable bit was the combination of 'old dogs' and 'farm'. If you're talking about 'young dogs' and 'random people who might or might not live on farms', it gets more plausible that your dogs were being given to people who wanted pets.

(I have some family with similar dog-owning patterns to your mother, and it bothers me a lot.)

I just looked up on Facebook a girl whom I was friends with at summer camp and had a crush on at age 12. (and tried to organize the six prepositions in that sentence in the most intuitive possible way) Anyway, she's now a member of the Harvard, Conde Nast, and New Yorker networks. My immediate response was "Wow, I didn't realize she came from such a rich family."

91 is bizarre. Who takes 4-6 years to housebreak a dog? And rotating new dogs through the house at a pace of one every couple of years is really, really strange.

91: It sounds like maybe your mother was just giving your dogs away, even if it wasn't to farms.

That's about the time my mother would give up trying to housebreak them, and move on to another dog.

Brock was an only child.

Eventually.

95, see 8. It is bizarre.

Picked up the girlies, now we're eight deep. Car's barely moving, but now we got heat. Made a left turn as I watched in fright. My ex-girlfriend shot out my headlight. She was standing in the road, so I smashed her toes.
Mashed my pedal - boom, down she goes. Law ain't lyin'; long hairs flyin'; we flipped the skeez off -- dumb girl starts cryin'. Baby called the cops, now I'm gettin' nervous. The cops see a beeper and the suckers might serve us. Hit a side street and what did we find? Some young punk, dropping me a flip off sign. Put the deuce in reverse, and started to curse; another sucker on the south side about to get hurt.

Here's another thing: I can GUARANTEE my mother wasn't paying anyone to put the dogs to sleep. So, if vets won't do that for free, and they really weren't going to live on farms (which I'm don't accept), then she talked a friend to taking them out to the edge of the highway somewhere and letting them go.

Saddest-ever 100?

Aw, man, Brock, you're breaking my heart. Do you have a dog now? If you don't, have you thought about getting one? It'll keep your kids from getting asthma, and you can make it up to all your childhood dogs by treating it really well.

A girl in my school lived with her mother and the mother's boyfriend, a low-life gun-runner and drug smuggler. When the girl was in fifth grade and I in sixth, my sister whispered to me the gossip that the girl had to go to the hospital because she had sat down on the spine of a book and begun uncontrollably bleeding from her vagina. It wasn't until I was in my 20's that I realized she had probably been molested by the mother's boyfriend.

Similarly, a brother and sister lived with foster parents who were briefly our neighbors. The boy confided to me that he and the sister had been removed from their parents' home because the parents had forced them to "do it" with one another. I didn't believe him.

95/98: I don't think my mother has ever successfully housebroken a dog. And we've had a lot of dogs. She always blamed the dog, and thought the next one might do better. But it was usually a few years before she'd become frustrated enough to actually get rid of the thing.

Thank god you potty-trained before age four.

102: And dogs love spoiled cottage cheese!

It took Fleur to point out to me, when I was well into my thirties, the obvious homosexuality of at least five members of my (extended) family. The thought just never occurred to me.

"So Knecht, the reason you weep every time we make love...."

102: my wife has two dogs, both rescues. (I disavow ownership, to avoid chores.)

103 makes me wonder if Iris will someday figure out that the girl next door has drug-dealing parents. Sunday Iris went over to play for awhile. When I came by to pick her up, the mom ran out to a car, bathrobe-clad, handed something off through the car window, and ran back inside. Subtle.

my wife has two dogs, both rescues

John Galt wouldn't "rescue" a dog.

I have a vivid memory, when I was six or seven, of an adult (my guess is, he was mid-to-late-20s, but it's really just a guess) who was nicely chatting with me at an event where my parents were busy (they were organising it) and I had a book to read. I didn't altogether like him - at least, not as much as I liked reading my book - but I was a polite child. (Really.) Anyway, he invited me to come for a walk with him outside, and I didn't want to, and he said no, I should, it would be fun: let's go! I didn't know who he was but presumed he was part of the crowd of people my parents knew at the event. But, I didn't particularly want to, and I priggishly recalled the rule about not going anywhere with strangers, so I said no thank you, again, and went off and found my parents and stood near them for a while, and this adult went away (and I do not recall ever seeing him again). I probably went back to reading my book, and certainly never mentioned the incident to my parents.

I didn't forget the incident, but for years I remembered it as "oh, what a paranoid kid I was: imagine thinking a nice guy who was a friend of my parents could be a child molester!"

It occurred to me about fifteen to twenty years later that in fact a child molester was almost certainly exactly what that man was: he'd just wandered in, spotted a small child sitting by herself, and figured he could get me out and on my own with a bit of quick talking.

So, well.

The dogs are her minions, JRoth. They owe their life to her and are expected to repay that gratitude with loyalty and, most important, service.

110: Right, but if the dog freely chose to associate with him, supporting itself and generating value, he'd be fine with that. I assume the dogs are employed.

I seem to have confused the word "gratitude" with "generosity", not for the first time.

111: Oh, I have a similar but cheerier story. I was at a barbecue once, when I was around five or so, and got into a conversation with a grownup who was great fun. I was an annoyingly precocious and articulate kid, which meant that a lot of my conversations with adults got stuck on "Aren't you adorable/unusual" which is kind of dull once you've been through it a couple of times. But this guy was great -- we were talking about space travel, and bugs, and all kinds of stuff.

Many years later, that barbecue came up in conversation; the guy was the hostess's brother, who was schizophrenic. Later, he was caught trying to break into Gracie Mansion to kill Mayor Koch with an axe. Apparently people spent the barbecue telling my parents "You know Elizabeth has been talking to Eddie for a long time time now" all night, but they figured that we both looked like we were having a good time, so no harm done.

And rotating new dogs through the house at a pace of one every couple of years is really, really strange.

My grandmother was like that with her dogs. They were housebroken, but she had little tolerance for a dog that was a screw-up. Three-four years, max, for most of them.

My dad thinks it's because as child, her dad shot her dog in front of her.

"So, the bugs developed space travel and telepathy, and one of them changed his form and got elected mayor. It's my mission to send him back to his home planet. Wanna help?"

There were actually a bunch of stories about this guy. He was really very crazy, but also very bright and maintained well most of the time. And his siblings (this was the 70s) were sort of dopey hippieish types. So he'd start losing it, and they'd get worried that he was going to do something like try to kill someone with an axe, and try to get him involuntarily committed. And then he'd show up in court with a great suit on, and a good haircut, and his siblings would show up looking all scruffy and saying "Hey, man, he really needs to be someplace to keep him safe," and he'd say "I'm so sorry that your time is being wasted like this, your honor. I don't really know why they're trying to have me committed -- there are some unfortunate family dynamics there -- but clearly there's no need for it." And then the judge would let him go and chew out the siblings.

When he actually got caught going over the fence at Gracie Mansion, the dynamic changed, of course.

111: I'm not sure why you think "the crowd of people my parents knew at the event" and "child molester" are mutually exclusive categories. Doesn't it seem less likely that a stranger was there uninvited (and unnoticed?) than that a family friend was a closeted child molester?

I know someone who was raped by a friend of her father's in very similar circumstances. (Except he found her alone for a minute at the party, and forced (rather than asked) her to go out side.)

She was 11 though, not 6 or 7. Not that that makes a difference. Her parents didn't believe her.

I feel like I should have stories of this nature, but I don't, because details of most of my childhood seem to have been forgotten. I don't know why I seem to have such a bad memory, but I read stories like these or listen to my girlfriend talk about what she did as a kid and I realize I recall very little by comparison. Now, she kept diaries for years, and spent a lot of time re-reading the diaries, which would definitely reinforce things, but most people don't do much of that, and still seem to know more.

I really think most of the things I know as stories about my childhood are things I learned later, as stories, rather than remembering them myself.

119: "friend" is too strong in both its occurrences in 119. Replace with "loose acquaintance".

closeted child molester

An odd turn of phrase. Most of them aren't out of the closet.

And boy, does this turn of the conversation make me (a) thank my lucky stars that my children are both surly and non-compliant and (b) start trying to think of ways to make them surlier and less compliant. And want to simply stick my fingers in my ears and say "lalalalalala I can't hear you."

I feel a little cheated now that I see everyone has such funny stories about growing up. When I was very young (5-11-years-old or so), and would otherwise have been under similar misapprehensions, I had the bad fortune to hang out with a neighbor kid (and Sunday School buddy) who was two years older than me. So I got to see his parents' sex toy collection, an hear about him walking in on the ol' primal scene, and find out what all the curse words meant, and which drugs did what and hear about his dalliances with the laydeez long before I would have formed any alternate explanations. He was kinda precocious too, so I knew as much at 8 as most 12-year-olds would have about various things. Always had an angle, that guy. Now he's an utterly boring suburban dad with 3 kids and a job at the phone company.

122: yes, an odd phrase. I only meant to avoid the implication that Jesurgislac's parents might have been invited known pedophiles to their parties.

Nathan, I know another dude who claims that he doesn't remember much of his childhood. Says it is all a blur, he has nearly no recall before, say, high school.

Since it's suddently on-topic, I did once have someone who I'd never met before show up at the front office of my school once in the middle of the day, claiming to be my grandfather and trying to "take me home". Both my grandfathers were dead at the time, so I was instantly suspicious. Police were called, but the man vanished before they showed up.

re: 125

I have some incredibly clear and distinct childhood memories that date from being around 2, but largely my childhood is a blur too. Lots of episodic memories and no sense that stuff is 'missing' or blanked, I just don't remember long periods in any great detail. It's just all a blend of school, and football, and school, and books, and school, and football, etc.

119: I'm not sure why you think "the crowd of people my parents knew at the event" and "child molester" are mutually exclusive categories.

I don't now. But when I was 7, I certainly did. That was slightly the point of my story: it took me about fifteen years to realise that these categories were not mutually exclusive.

128: Oh. I guess I misunderstood some of the phrasing in 111. I thought you thought this was a complete stranger.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to finally figure out that his father was lying to him on that distant afternoon about "discovering" ice.

When I was about six, a man came up to me a playground, talked to me a bit, and then asked me if he could take a picture of me with his polaroid camera. So I said sure, and he suggested I put my hands over my heart. The photo came out great! I look totally angelic in it, which was not very common for me at that age. My parents still have the polaroid in the family album.

It's only recently that I've become convinced that the guy must've been some sort of molester. But maybe I'm wrong!

126: Is "Borkc Landers" one of Brock's childhood dogs? If so, Borkc, you're right, that wasn't your grandfather, and he didn't own a farm.

126 is horrifying.

I once walked a couple blocks to a neighbor girl's house and rang the bell. No one was home so I turned to leave, but her teenaged neighbor said that, no, Margaret wasn't home, but she'd be back any minute and I could come inside his house and wait for her. I said Noooo, backed up slowly, and tore ass home. My mother was sufficiently weirded by the story to try to get in touch with Margaret's parents. They weren't home, and certainly not about to be back any minute -- they'd gone to Philadelphia for the week.
What the kid did shouldn't have seemed so very creepy to me, but it sure did. (He wasn't someone that I knew at all.)

122: Yes, I've retold that anecdote a few times to parents who are getting pissy about having disrespectful, noncompliant children, to point out to them that there are definite virtues in having children who are not obedient and respectful: I have a friend whose two daughters were both molested by an old friend of the family who took disgusting advantage of their both being compliant, obedient kids who assumed that if an adult who knew their parents asked them to go off with him, it must be OK...

129: I guess I misunderstood some of the phrasing in 111. I thought you thought this was a complete stranger.

I did. (And, as far as I recall, he was.) But my parents knew/know a lot of people, not all of whom were people I would have immediately recognized: as far as my imperfect memory of him goes, he was a stranger whom I'd never seen before/never saw again. Still, I had assumed at 7 that if he was at the event, he was part of the group of people my parents knew, therefore he was OK: my non-compliance about the walk outside was just that I didn't like him much and the rules of behavior as I understood them allowed me to refuse.

126 is horrifying.

I've just always found it incredibly bizarre, really. Maybe it should be horrifying, but it seems closer to comically inept. (If attempted child kidnappings can be described as "comical.") I mean, if he'd said "a friend of your father's", there would at least have been some sort of plausible deniability. But my grandfather? Did he honestly expect to get me out of the building without noticing that he wasn't, in fact?

I have vivid memories from age 2 on. But I can't remember the way home from new places. So I've got that going for me.

Simple, go back to where you were at age 2 and then retrace your life.

136: Not to add to any issues you may already have, but don't you wonder why/how this person chose you? That's the freakiest bit.

Did he honestly expect to get me out of the building without noticing that he wasn't, in fact?

Although that bit is pretty funny.

STOP THIS NONSENSE ABOUT ME BEING DEAD AND GIVE YOUR PAPPY A NICE HUG.

139: oh, no, I've never wondered. I was a beautiful child. Why wouldn't he choose me?

126: Both my grandfathers were dead at the time.

Maybe you were just told that when they actually had gone off to live on a farm.

142: There's a line from the lovely Kiki and Herb cabaret show that goes something like, "if you were never molested as a child, well, you must have been an ugly child."

144: I was an ugly child.

I don't think there's anything from my boring childhood to figure out. But then I've spent another day beoing told in many different ways that I'm hopelessly naive, so maybe I'm just dumb.

And then he'd show up in court with a great suit on, and a good haircut, and his siblings would show up looking all scruffy and saying "Hey, man, he really needs to be someplace to keep him safe," and he'd say "I'm so sorry that your time is being wasted like this, your honor. I don't really know why they're trying to have me committed -- there are some unfortunate family dynamics there -- but clearly there's no need for it." And then the judge would let him go and chew out the siblings.

Someone I knew who had schizophrenia once went from raving, fighting, totally out of control nuts to perfectly reasonable and compliant as soon as the police showed up to take her back to the hospital. Within a half mile, the cop car pulled over. She'd just about succeeded in talking the officers into believing that the men who'd been restraining her had actually been assaulting her and that they should turn her loose and arrest those guys.

138 has promise, but I might get nauseated reliving all the time I spent on merry-go-rounds.

But then I've spent another day beoing told in many different ways that I'm hopelessly naive, so maybe I'm just dumb.

Where's bob mcmanus talking with you now?

100:Here's another thing: I can GUARANTEE my mother wasn't paying anyone to put the dogs to sleep. So, if vets won't do that for free, and they really weren't going to live on farms (which I'm don't accept), then she talked a friend to taking them out to the edge of the highway somewhere and letting them go.

That's probably correct. They do have people who run (essentially) rescue farms - but they're always full up. Meanwhile I have friends who live way out there, and they always have had some random dog or another living with them, that just showed up one day because somebody dumped by the roadside. Your mom sounds like the dumper type.

Based on 69.1, I can only assume that max is Barack Obama ("living in KY"? KY = Kenya, obvs.).

I wish. Sadly, no. I look way too much like a Nordmann (as my mother tends to point out while watching the Winter Olympics) - in fact, that's the part that gets me honorary honkiehood. ('Max! Max! There was this skier, and he's up on the podium and he looks just like you!')

Don't listen to Summers, Barack! Do what's in your Secret Muslim Socialist heart!

Also: if somebody suggested to me that I hire Summers, well.

Jesus: 'You should hire Larry Summers! He's geenieus!'
Me: 'Jesus, is there something wrong? Is there some kind of family problem? Are you hittin' the sauce again? You know, wine might the stuff of life, but not in like, ginourmous quantities.'
Jesus: 'Time thinks he's a genius! He's real popular with FT! I'm just sayin'!'
Me: 'Well, unsay it. I mean, that's just crazy talk. If I wanted a retread I'd ask for the bit about the moneylenders and the temple again. Goddamn.'

And 69: Yow. That's what we call a perverse incentive.

I'm sure there's some of that. It was the late 60's, and I think it has been pretty conclusively demonstrated at this point that nobody what the hell they were tryin' to do. He went and married some crazy lady who had four kids and intense acid habit. Then he split up with her and succeeded on the third try. Later on, apparently, he took in some teenaged black kid. (Nothin' wrong with that. Bit late to show, tho.)

Cheerier: my step-father was a motorcycle mechanic and all-around hippy. He really really liked his hemp products. So he was all into watchin' PBS and that kind of thing. So I got lots of Britcoms and subtitled B&W Kurosawa stories when I was small. Anyways, they needed volunteers for the local station's pledge drive and they said volunteers would get to meet members of Python, which had just started broadcasting the year before. So he volunteered and pledged money and whatnot.

And he didn't get to meet anybody. This honked him off to no end, because they promised. So he raised all kinds of hell, so they arranged it such that, the next time through, step-dad would get to meet John Cleese. So he's all happy and takes me in with him. I, of course, have seen all the episodes, probably several times at that point, so even though I was six or seven or so, I knew pretty much everything by heart.

So we're in the studio waitin', and he comes Mount Everest. He's like 10,000 feet tall, and clouds are circlin' his head, and it's rainin' up there somewhere. Or at least that's what it looked like to me, since I was maybe 4 foot tall at the time. Anyways, the local PBS guy walks Cleese over and says yadda yadda, one of our volunteers, who really wanted to meet you. Hi, I'm etc., handshake, and my step-dad says, I'd like you to meet my son and names me.

Cleese bends way over and shakes my head and asks something about watching the show. So, in a high, squeaky seven-year-old voice with psuedo-posh accent, I said: 'THIS... is an ex-parrot.' Which made him laugh... but, of course, I kept going, doing both sides of the routine from 'This is an ex-parrot' to somewhere around 'No, this is too silly, I can't continue.'

So, back on topic, I imagine it must of been pretty terrible for Cleese. He comes to America, and there all these Python nuts, including even the children and they're repeating routines that he knows by heart. No wonder he didn't want to deal with it anymore. Not to mention, I believe I embarrassed the shit out of my step-dad, who just wanted to meet one of his heroes.

max
['The upside is, of course, that I can say I cracked up John Cleese.']

From my wife:
I grew up in an entirely white town and had an entirely white circle of friends. When I was about 7, I was at a sleepover party at one friend's house. Her entire family was white except for her older sister, who was noticeably dark. Someone asked about the reason for this at the party, and the little girl replied, without missing a beat, "That's because my mother ate some bad food in Mexico while she was pregnant." I have no idea if the girl really believed this at the time or was just making it up, but I didn't have any reason to question this truth. This led to a long, long misunderstanding about race and some confusion about the powers of Mexican food.

my father had a story that he got lost when he was 3 yo, but he found the neighbouring willage walking all by himself holding a stick and shouting is there somebody from time to time

I got a squad with a list of complainers
I should have started HEBE:
Heebs Explains Baffling Entertainers
So we can make it known that we won't get swayed
It's ninety-one son, so somethin's gotta change

In Mongolia five-year-olds are jockeys in ten-mile horse races, so kids are probably a bit tougher there.

given the distance between the willages it was like a miracle, my grandma used to say
and he didn't look that distressed even, when people found him
speaking of miracles, my mom had 'a soul departing' experience (suns zailax, it's like an official diagnosis according to the buddhist scriptures or something) when she was 8-9 yo perhaps, because she got scared of something when she was tending the herd, it's basically just playing on the plains and as it is sung in the song i linked on the valentine's the distant mountain looks very near as if it's on your palm, so kids are seen from the home with the herd and nobody is around for miles, so it's pretty safe unless there is storming weather
and she told us she didn't remember anything for about a year, the symptoms were she wouldn't listen or otherwise communicate with anybody and used to run away far from the home and her younger sister used to go after her and fetch her and my mom was not weighting heavy at all for 6-7 yo girl to carry her back, according to my aunt
so one day a great lama was invited when was passing through the country, he was very famous, his son is now a renowned old script teacher and an expert on everything old sounding, so the lama read the scriptures and gave my mom some black tablet to take and told her to swallow, not bite
she regained her consciousness she said when she bit the tablet into two parts and swallowed it
she told us that perhaps caused shortening of her life, the biting of the tablet into two parts

i recalled all this b/c i'm reading "As I lay dying" this week it seems
a strange library book with somebody written all over the book remarks, a literary student, hs, writing an essay perhaps, even with some spelling mistakes
and the remarks does not match my impressions as i read

-es

re: post no. 6: when i was like 5, i found that stuff that vibrates feels nice when you hold it in your lap. so really enjoyed playing with some toys at grandma's. i never was 'caught', but after a few years i realized that this is not actually something to do when other people are around, at least when those other people are your family.

How come you never tell me when you have an orgasm, dear?
Because you're never around.

117: isn't that the plot to Men in Black?

MIB II.

Hail Kay! Hail Kay!