I’m joining this meme unasked. These are probably not in order, and possibly not even real (they’re memories, after all).

1. Waiting with my aunt and uncle for my mom to come home with my baby brother, worried that he was going to take up part of my room.

2. Eating dinner and watching for one of my parents’ cars to drive into the garage below our kitchen as they came home from work.

3. Playing with my dad while he used a heavy hole digger in the backyard to set up a piece of playground equipment, and accidentally doing something that caused it to hit my sister’s toe. I was yelled at, and felt terrible, both because I felt responsible, and because I felt I wasn’t showing enough remorse.

4. Playing on the playground at school, swinging upside down with my legs on the jungle gym, and then waking up to find a doctor putting stitches in the back of my head. I could feel the string going in!

5. Asking a teacher if I could hang out by myself in the hall during playtime so I could read quietly. She seemed very distraught that I didn’t want to stay in the same room as her and everyone else.

6. Changing clothes in the empty room of our second family house that would later become my bedroom (and then my brother’s).

7. Listening to Bill Cosby, Allen Sherman, and bible story records.

8. Charming the babysitter I had a kid crush on by showing her how I could create a BASIC program on our color computer to ask her name and repeat it back to her:

10 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME”, N$
20 PRINT “HELLO”; N$
30 PRINT “HOW ARE YOU TODAY”

She was amazed that I could do that, and let me stay up all the way until we saw my parents’ car lights enter the driveway, but I knew she had a boyfriend her own age and wasn’t really interested in me anyway.

9. Being told what happens in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie by a friend who’d seen it on day one. “And then, Raphael yelled because he lost his sai.”

10. Riding my bike down a hill way too fast, flipping the bike over, smashing my face up, and having to haul my injured self a few blocks home to my worried grandmother.