Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

OK, let’s see if I can avoid screwing this up. Meg, our favorite BC Bud, tagged me with the following meme, which I shall engage from the cramped quarters of what I’m coming to think of as my bomb shelter, my Slaughterhouse Five. I’ve taken up residence in my wife’s desktop computer owing to my laptop’s hard drive crash this morning, and the fact that my new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 600M that I ordered last weekend, is not scheduled to arrive until Wednesday. As you know, we’ve been married 31 years, but there’s cohabiting (generally enjoyable), and then there’s sharing a damn computer, a foible in human relationships that just cries out for a statistical analysis on its relationship to domestic disturbance. It’s a gambit that tips the tenor of conversation from “honey, you’re home!” to “How long do you think you’ll be staying this time?”

Anyway, here’s the game from Meg: You write about the 5 things you miss most about your childhood. All well and good, but then there’s a complicated little dance at the end with bubble-up linking and the usual Shirley Jacksonesque selection of new victims. Wish the fucking thing came with a user’s manual. OK, here goes - the 5 things I miss most about my childhood:

1. I really miss…hmmm, what was her name again? On the monkey bars, with the frilly skirt?
   
   
2. Summer band. Band was my social life in high school, and summer band was loose, relaxed and fun. We’d go play in small-town Strawberry Festivals, and we always went to Cedar Point, where we’d play for a while and then get free passes for the afternoon.
   
   
3. In fact, I miss playing my trumpet. I really liked playing in bands and ensembles, and I wish I had an adult group to play with. It takes regular practice to keep yourself in playing shape, and it’s not the kind of musical instrument that you can enjoy playing by yourself. I bought an electric guitar once, when my kid started playing, but it was sort of the same as when we started skiing together - he got really good really fast whilst I languished and, after a few (guitar) lessons, I punked out.
   
4. Ike. My young years were spent in the cocoon of the 50s, and there was no reason to think that the white-haired, avuncular Ike wasn’t going to always be the president. I remember one day at Glenwood grade school, which sat right beside the Ohio Turnpike. There must not have been an Air Force One then, because this one day a motorcade carrying Ike up to Minnesota to hunt quail was supposed to pass by us on the Turnpike, and the entire school lined the windows on that side to see the brace of black Cadillac sedans with 48-star flags snapping furiously on their hoods. I remember being discomfited in 1960 when I realized that Ike actually wouldn’t be president forever, and we had to choose between Nixon, the vice president we’d hardly ever seen, and Kennedy, annoyingly nasal and, worse, a Catholic. I wish I still had the Nixon/Lodge badge I wore to school that fall, the one with prism lines so that, viewed from one angle, it had Nixon’s picture and, from another angle, Henry Cabot Lodge’s. I mean, if the now-me lived in the 50s, I’d certainly be a very frustrated Adlai Stevenson voter, but the then-me lived in a chrysalis that Ike personified.
   
5. Locusts. In August. Their advent, of course, meant the end of summer, but I miss the enveloping heat of an Ohio summer night, with a few fireflies bobbing in the near distance and the crescendo-decrescendo of locusts tolling the final days of bucolic freedom.
   

• Ultrablog
  
• Snidget
  
• Mike at Chew Toys
  
• Meg at BlogCabin
  
• and the luminous Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

• I see Freshman44 hasn’t caught this one yet, and I needs me some payback on her ass.
  
• Actually, this really feels like my childhood - my “friends” list was never very long. But maybe I’ll welcome Philip of Just Playing back to the blogosphere with a splash.

I think that’s enough for this one.