Tag... I'm It

I've been tagged by Lyvvie to talk about the top 5 things I miss from my childhood.
But first...the Rules.

Remove the blog #1 from the following list and bump everyone up one place; add your blog's name in the number five spot. You need to link to each of the blogs for much cross pollenation of your pal's blogs.

1. third world county
2. BTW
3. Soliloquy
4. Lyvvie's Limelight
5. The Cerebral Outpost

Next, select four new friends to add to the pollen count. (Not obligated to partake)

1. Mr. Haney – Ramblin’ On
2. Mark – Meandering Musings Muster Madness
3. GEL – Silken Threads
4. Judy – JustaskJudy

(and because I’ve never been good at conforming)
5. Walker – Lost Here and Beyond

Okay. Now that you've wasted an hour of your life cutting and pasting ~ write about the five things you miss the most from childhood.

Mine are as follows:

1. My mother’s cooking. Understand one thing before you continue reading this one ~ mother (and the rest of the world at that time) wasn’t worried about things like cholesterol levels, maintaining a stick-thin figure, carcinogens and sugar highs. She was more concerned that we enjoyed what we ate and that she could manage to make both my German and my Irish/English grandparents happy by keeping some old family recipes alive. It wasn’t her fault that she prepared most meals in bacon fat or butter, and baked everything with a truckload of sugar. Blame could be layed on ancestry and ignorance; but not on mom.

The thing I loved most about her dinners was that they were served at precisely the same time every single day (except Sundays when we had a huge midday meal instead. The house would start smelling like delicious food sometime around 5 p.m. and by 6:00 all six of us were sitting around the table together, hands and faces washed and ready to share all our little bits and pieces about the day. You could set your watch by our dinner time. In fact, the entire neighborhood retreated to their dinner tables at just about the same time. It was the thing to do back then.

2. I miss the old neighborhood, terribly. Most of our neighbors were immigrants (some first generation but many second or third) from Italy. If you’ve ever watched or heard of the Sopranos, this was pretty much my old neighborhood. People looked out for one another and everyone within a three-block radius was “family.” You never shit on each other and all of the parents minded all of the children ~ even to the point of disciplining when necessary.

(incase you don’t believe me about the Sopranos reference, here’s a picture taken at the funeral of a mutual friend. This was four years ago, just after 9/11. We all grew up within a block of one another)

After school, you did your homework then ran out to play. Stickball was one of our favorite activities and back then, traffic was light and slow enough that you could use your own street as a playing field. Nobody got pissed off when a car interrupted the game ~ you just got out of the way and waited till it moved on then picked up the game where you left off.

There was always someone to play with. If Tony and Anna weren’t home you could walk down the block and find Georgie V or Freddie S hanging out at the schoolyard. If the schoolyard was empty, just continue around the corner to the candy store and sure as shit, there would be any one of the more than fifteen other friends from the same street. There were plenty of doors to knock on, and you were always greeted by parents with a welcoming smile.

I don’t even know who my neighbors are today. We wave and smile politely if we happen to catch one another getting into or out of our cars. That’s the extent of it; nothing even close to the way it used to be back home.

3. I miss how my dad used to take us kids on an outing every single weekend during the nice weather, offering mom a break for the day. He took us to places like the Staten Island Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Bronx Zoo, Coney Island, Asbury Park, Olde Richmondtown (a restored historical site with museums and people dressed in period clothing on Staten Island) … actually, there were too many outings to name. Having been born and raised in Manhattan, he also loved to just take us on various subway rides through the boroughs. I think he was showing off a bit ~ he knew those trains like nobody else. He was such a cool guy to hang out with. Often times, we’d ride a train till he got struck with a brainstorm and we’d get off and head to some obscure little museum or shop.

We’d leave early in the morning and without fail, we would return just in time for dinner.

4. I miss having a completely trashed bedroom and not giving the slightest shit about it. My mother would get after me every other weekend or so, and I’d scurry things into closets and drawers or under the bed till the room passed inspection, but within a day, it was usually right back to being a heaving pile of crap. We weren’t allowed to bring food upstairs to our rooms, so the junk wasn’t hazardous; it was just a simple mass of kid toys, dolls and stuffed animals, clothing, shoes, books and paper. Even as a young kid, I always did a lot of writing and loved to surround myself with every bit of it. I think I kept about three diaries at a time. I still have several of them and love to turn the pages on occasion, remembering the good and the bad times.


5. I miss the music. I grew up on several genres. Mostly my parents flooded my sensory receptors with 30s and 40s Big Band stuff. This remains my favorite type of music. Lyrics were written with such flair and grace and the tempos were so varied. You could enjoy strings and horns and tasteful drums in every single song. Sinatra was a staple in our house; he was born and raised just across the river from us in Hoboken, NJ and my best friend was a second or third cousin of his (probably fifth cousin twice removed but when you were a kid in our neighborhood, a cousin wuzza cousin ~ know what I’m sayin?)

My oldest sister listened to 50s tunes on the AM radio in her room, and my second oldest sister was a Motown and 60s fanatic.

Then there was Susan ~ my nemesis. She, being two years my senior, turned me on to the lovely sounds of Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Grand Funk etc. She also turned me on to marijuana and single-handedly made me wish I were an only child. She was the family rebel and enjoyed terrorizing me at every turn in the road, the be-otch. I do thank her, however, for having one hell of an album (LP) collection back then.

As I moved on through time, I became particularly fond of music of the Eagles, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, America, Blind Faith (or any Eric Clapton actually), Black Sabbath, Doors, etc. But my hero from that era, as far as vocals and lyrics, remains Joni Mitchell.

Oops, this wasn’t supposed to be a post about music.

Anyway, there you have five things I miss the most about my childhood. Perhaps another time I will create a post on things I hated the most about my childhood, but I’ll have to wait till I’m in a particularly hateful mood for that one.

It should go without saying that the two things I truly miss the most about my childhood are my mom and dad; but some days you just don’t feel like going all mushy so I refrained from delving into that any further than I already have.

Thank you, Lyvvie, for making me recall these things and get them into writing. It was fun for me.