A list of some of my most vivid and earliest childhood memories:
1. Constantly sucking on my mother’s arm everywhere we went. Sucking on my own arm and “bringing it in” to class for show and tell. I wanted to bring my mother’s arm, but she refused. This habit was eventually replaced with the much more satisfying and socially acceptable habit of smoking.
2. The life-size portrait of Big Bird hanging on my wall directly in front of my bed that scared the ever living shit out of me at night.
3. My father feeding me green-pea soup before he left on a business trip. I hated green-pea soup. I let it build up in my mouth until I couldn’t hide it anymore, and then spit it out all over him. His business suit covered in green and ruined.
4. The day my parents bought me a bed tent. Feeling unbelievably excited. So excited that I wet the bed that night and they made me throw it away.
5. Chasing a scorpion around one of the rooms in our first house until it clamped down on my finger and caused me the most excruciating pain I had felt to date: later to be followed by managing to get a metal pipe stuck in my leg, using my tongue as the breaking mechanism for my tricycle and chopping the tip of it off (it grows back amazingly), and cutting off a piece of my hand while chopping carrots the exact opposite way my mother had taught me only moments before. I’ve always been a trial and error type of girl.
