let's start with. . .

I don't remember much of my childhood. I have very distinct impressions about it--that it was mostly happy, in fact--but whenever people start to say, "Don't you remember when. . .?" I usually don't. Maybe my mind has long since been too cluttered with random, useless trivia to remember my childhood. Maybe I made more of an impression on others than I did on myself. That is to say, maybe they were paying more attention than I was at the time. Or maybe I really have squashed a bunch of my memories (good ol' repression), though for what reason. . .

Here's what I can tell you: I had a small collection of friends. Carrie and Chad Minton lived down the street from me; Chad was my age and Carrie was a couple years older. I played with both of them, sometimes together, sometimes separately. It was sort of "whoever is willing to play with me." I remember taking swimming lessons with them. I remember eating watermelon, and how Carrie used to put salt on hers. Carrie had Wham! on cassette tape. Their dad had a Camero that we couldn't all fit in the backseat; their mom had a Bronco. They had a basset hound, too. Barney? I think that was his name.

I had a Raggedy Ann doll, and Carrie once took it from me and hid it and told me that it was now in one of the tall silos used by the Georgetown Railroad to store whatever it was they were always hauling (limestone mostly, I think). I remember being desperate to get my doll back and yet fearful of trying to somehow get to the tall, silver structure that seemed so very far from her front porch. Carrie wasn't actually very nice to me. I think I learned how to be mean by hanging around her.

Chad adored me, but he was always kind of moist and snotty, just generally unattractive. I wonder if he grew out of that. He must've, right?

We watched a lot of musical movies at their house: Annie and the version of Cinderella with Lesley Ann Warren. We played a board game called Uncle Willie (or was it Willy?), too. He was some kind of animal--a pig? rabbit? donkey?--in a coat and top hat. What was that about?

Carrie would sometimes invite me to sleepovers, and she and her friends (all older than me) would try to scare me with ghost stories and also try to make me do icky stuff during games of Truth-or-Dare. Meh. I remember going in the closet once--or did they put me in there?--and I either wouldn't come out, or they left me there, something like that. I think when the Mintons moved away (the parents were divorcing), I was mostly relieved, actually.

Also in our neighborhood, right next to the Mintons actually, lived Ryan Humphries and his family. His dad had a motorcycle, and they had two collie dogs, too. Their house--that is to say, mobile home, as we lived in a mobile home park--was crazy. It was wall-to-wall board games and LEGOs. The Humphries were very family-centered, you know, and played games with their kids all the time. It was somewhere between cool and cloying.

Ryan was an odd duck, but he always did what I told him, so that made him easy to hang around with. We played Star Trek and Last Unicorn games in the yard. Or we'd make each other crossword puzzles and then trade papers so we could solve them. That kind of thing. And, of course, whenever I was over at his place (sometimes with Chad) we'd play with LEGOs and do board games and stuff.

At school, my best friend was Emily Schmidt. I think we must've been social outcasts, though I didn't have any real sense of it at the time. (My mother swears I was miserable, but I don't remember that; maybe I really did block this stuff out.) Emily and I loved Moonlighting, and we talked about it all the time, calling each other after the show aired and all that kind of thing. We'd make up our own Moonlighting plots during recess, sometimes act them out. I always had to be David, though. Maybe because I was better at wry humor.

Sleeping over at Emily's was like sleeping in a deranged toy store. She had so much stuff, and her room was always such a wreck. . . She had an older brother that we almost never saw. I don't even remember his name, can't picture him at all.

Emily and I played crazy games with her Barbies. They were always on a cruise, like the Love Boat or something, and the bartender Ken we called "Ted." And he'd hit on Barbie, of course. And he'd make his head spin all the way around and she'd run screaming. I don't know why we did these things. . .

We also made radio shows together. We'd put a tape in the recorder and pretend to be radio DJs. And we'd make stupid jokes and all that kind of thing. I wonder if Emily still has these tapes somewhere? Seems unlikely.

I can credit Emily with introducing me to Huey Lewis and the News. She loved their music.

Finally, my true best friend was Tara Beaver. She moved in next door when I was seven or eight, and of all these people, she's the only one I'm still in touch with, though I don't have a clue why she bothers with me. But that's such a l-o-n-g story, that I'll end this post here and take up more stories on another day.