13 thoughts on “Reader Friday: Childhood Memory

  1. I wrote about a traumatic experience when I was 13, an argument I had with my dear sweet mother. I’ve never forgotten that moment because it was the first time I saw my teen hormone-driven behavior. I had an odd out-of-body experience in my fit of anger as if I could see my own face & the fear, concern & love in my mom’s. This moment is in the opening scenes to IN THE ARMS OF STONE ANGELS, my first YA novel with Harlequin Teen. Experiencing that peculiar incident changed me and deflated my anger. My mom became more than a mom after that and we’re very close today.

    Of course I had to write about. These are the things readers never discover unless they ask and the author is willing to share. We put our life’s blood into our work, if only for our own gratification.

  2. A 72-year old P.I. travels to N.J. to visit his cousin, who lives in the house where their grandparents lived in their youth. The scene is written, but hasn’t found a home yet.

    I recently spent two nights in that house. Recently renovated, it’s used as a guest house at the nursing home where my grandfather served as business manager (today the same job would be called something like “Senior Vice President for Financial Management”). A trip back in time. The pink bathroom tile. The scent of his cigar smoke, still emanating from the walls and woodwork, as it does for Norm Vander Wall in the scene I wrote.

  3. I can think of at least two childhood memories that made it into my novel. One was an escapade at the age of seven or so, with my cousin, where we dug and dug in a deserted lot until we ‘reached China.’ Another was my older brother (who I now love,) mercilessly chiding me about being ‘a girl,’ and my father coming to my defense by screaming at my brother, “He’s got two balls, just like you!”
    The fact that these memories made it into my novel, A Vampire’s Tale, and fit pretty seamlessly, speaks to the power of our experiences, and how they impact our writing.

  4. Iwakuni, Japan, is where my sister and I lived three years, between the ages of five and seven. Contrary to culture in the United States, we played miles away from our home: in cemeteries, on bamboo hills, in deserted parks, etc. When I look back, I am amazed that we survived those years. I can’t tell you the number of times we got lost or found ourselves in life or death situations.

    1. I ran across a highway, a car slammed on brakes and missed me by inches. It was so close that I felt the breeze from the stop and reached out to touch the hood of the car, as if I would stop it after it stopped.

    2. I got lost in the bamboo hills, what seemed like miles and miles of nothing but bamboo trees, which all looked alike. It felt like hours, but I’m sure it was less than 30 minutes. For a five year old, seeing everything the same in a forest is quite scary.

    3. We played hide and seek in a cemetery, not realizing we were being disrespectful. We hid in dilapidated graves, barely squeezing into areas inhabited by those who were seeking to rest peacefully.

    4. We accidentally drifted into the middle of a damn while playing in a docked Japanese fishing boat, and none of the three children ages four – six knew how to swim.

    I’ve thought about writing a memoir one day, entitled, Nine Lives and The Magic Closet.

  5. When I was a baby, my family lived on the third floor of a six-apartment tenement in Boston. The house was set sideways on the lot and faced a highly-trafficked Mobil gas station. My mother attached a hook for a baby swing in the entrance to the house. On nice days, she attached the swing and strapped me in to happily watch the goings-on in the gas station, while she returned upstairs to do housework. Whenever any tenants went in or out of the house, they’d give the swing a push, since it was in their way anyhow. Apparently, people weren’t as concerned about child kidnappings back then.

    I think I remember bouncing around in that swing, but I also have a photograph of me ensconced in it when I was nine months old. Anyway, I included such a scene in my first novel.

  6. When I was twelve, my best friend’s father killed her and her mother. I was supposed to spend the weekend with her, but something prevented it, not sure what now. For months afterward I thought my father would do the same thing. And a fictionalized version made it into one of my books.

  7. When I was a boy, my Dad was the chairman of a basketball tournament committee that used tourney proceeds to provide supplemental scholarships to American Indian students.

    Every years, the committee would designate an “Indian of the Year”, and bring him to Phoenix to honor that person on the last night of the tournament, during the trophy presentations. In 1954, Johnny Mize, Big Jawn himself, was in town, and I got to meet him and visit with him a little while. He had a lot of stories and could keep a guy laughing for 20-30 minutes straight.

    The next year, the committee honored Lewis Tewanima. Mr. Tewanima was a nice and humble Hopi man. Most people will not remember either his name or his achievements. One of his achievements was at the 1912 Olympic games, where he won the silver medal for the 10,000 run. (The next time an American who would achieve a medal in that event was Billy Mills, an Oglala Dakota, in the 1964 Tokyo games. He won the gold.)

    But one of the most fascinating things to me about Mr. Tewamina was not so much that he was a teammate of Jim Thorpe both at Carlisle Indian School and on the Olympic team.

    It was that, when he was a boy, the Hopi boys would get up early, before sunrise. (All Hopis arose before dawn.) They would run from their homes atop the Hopi mesas, go down the 5,700-foot-high mesa to the high-desert floor, and go ‘cross country, south, 64 miles to the Arizona town of Winslow, for no other reason than to watch the noon train go through. They’d find some water. Then they’d run home. It was a good way to spend a day.

    Haven’t use either meeting in a story yet.

  8. I haven’t used a cherished memory, but I did write about the day I lost my mother, only I fictionalized it. And it remains one of my fans favorite flash fiction pieces. Go figure.

  9. I grew up pushing my father around in his wheel chair (Vietnam-related). I was a big boy and even at nine I could push my dad through a shopping mall without too much work – my mom would switch off with me.
    We had fewer handicapped parking spaces back then. I remember going out with my parents on Black Friday one year to the mall. I knew they were going to get me a new bike and I was really quite excited…
    We found nowhere to park near enough to the doors for my dad. I remember cars filled all the handicapped slots. Very few had handicap tags or plates. I told my folks I could help push dad through the parking lot, but my mother wouldn’t have it. “Too dangerous”, she said.
    It’s not so dramatic, but I think I’d like to fictionalize a scene where my protagonist does what I so often want to do. I want to give him my own experiences, having grown up with a handicapped father… maybe a sister for the book. I want him, as an adult, to be under some great stress related to the main story, and just SNAP! when he sees a few perfectly healthy young and obnoxious people climb out of a car crookedly parked in a handicapped spot.
    Maybe he’ll empty a clip into their Jeep, while they watch in terror. Maybe better would be his taking a baseball bat, or a tire iron to the car.
    By the way, I still got that bicycle, so it all ended well enough.

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