Tell me all about 10-year-old you

My best friend Tricia Murphy said that Kevin Dunn's parents told him the facts of life right there at the dinner table. I am stunned by this information, mostly becuase I don't know what the facts of life are. When I asked my mother, she told me alot about birds and eggs, and then handed me a book about bees.
I feel that "the facts of life' are, indeed FACTS - and RULES - that everyone will become privy to as they grow older. Kind of like going from brownie to girl scout.
FACT: Work hard and you will progress.
That sort of thing.
I feel that my goal should be to figure out "the facts of life".
I am devastated when I realize it's just sex.

School starts and I have the teacher known for strict alphabetical order and forcing people to learn all the state capitals by heart. A boy I barely know let a crush on me fester all summer. He presents me, silently, with a thick handful of notepaper on which he has written my name, over and over, 4 columns to a side, each side, 5 whole sheets. I will still have these in my possession, 35 years later. Although we continue through school together for 7 more years, we never mention this incident. This is the year I want to be a detective. We have to write formal letters as a class assignment, so I write to President Richard Nixon, informing him of my current skills with cyphers and codes, asking for a job with the FBI.

I earn some money by babysitting for various neighbors on our quiet street and use it to buy an MIA bracelet. My parents (mostly my mother, for some reason) and I fight about it. I will wear it every day until I am 15.

My mother plays piano and our house rings with the music. We have a turntable in the living room and my sister and I play Tom Lehrer's album, the one with the red, white and black cover, with the devil playing a curving keyboard, over and over again, until we have it all memorized. Then we produce skits, acting out the songs. I don't understand the implications of My Home Town or The Old Dope Peddler for two or three more years. We see the high school production of Annie Get Your Gun. I fall in love with the guy who plays the lead.

Toward the end of the school year as my 11th birthday approaches, I proceed to fall in love with a boy in my class (not the one who had the crush) and scheme up a way to kiss him. Quite cleverly I say "Let me tell you a secret" and when he leans down I kiss him by the ear. He doesn't realize what has happened, wants to know what secret. I am overcome with something, possibly shame, and can not speak to him until we are seniors in high school.

It is a good year. The next year, life started falling apart, but when I am 10, things are okay.

~Rambling of a Procrastinator~

"Thank you, come again" - Apu from Simpsons

http://www.subsidesports.de/de/images/product/large/livass92.gif

- and wore the whole thing with pride. My best friends were M4rk Ashcr0ft and Ne1l Bra1den and on Saturday afternoons we used to go to each others' houses to play football outside and video games. Mark had Streetfighter II on the SNES so we used to play that a lot though I wasn't very good. When we went to Neil's we sometimes played Subbuteo though I could never really see the appeal. The prettiest girl in my class was called C4ther1ne Wyl13. She was beautiful but way out of my league. I fancied Judy Ch4n but she ended up going out with Neil, despite sending both of us Valentine's cards. I was sad but not surprised. He was funnier and better at football than me. And not as nerdy. I was one of the brightest in my class and used to have healthy rivalry with J0hn Denn1s0n and Ph1l1p And3rson for who would come top in class tests. I got 76/80 once in a mock 11+ - we did these every week. Once J0hn got 78 and I was a bit jealous. I'd never beat that.

When I was 10 my (paternal) Grandpa died. Mum got the phone call just as we were coming home one day and, crying, told us to stay in the car - presumably so we wouldn't hear it from someone else. The Troubles were still going on (I'm from NI) so I thought there might be a bomb in the house. There wasn't, but there was much crying when Dad got home. Mum and Dad didn't take us to the funeral, which I'm still not happy about. We were far too overprotected. We went to a memorial service a couple of weeks later though. I liked Grandpa - he always gave us Mr Kipling's almond slices when we went to his flat, and he had a moustache that bristled when he kissed me.

My brother and I were childminded by a friend of my mum's called Etta. We went to her house after school and during the holidays. I hated having to get up early all summer, but we could watch TV and play football in their huge garden with her boys, who were both older than us. They were pretty cool, and liked bands like Nirvana, the Chilis, Dead Kennedys, Alice In Chains and Mudhoney. I was a little intimidated by this stuff.

In all, I was a happy ten-year old, but probably a bit too precocious and nerdy for my own good. This would catch up on me at "big school".

6th grade.

Only been in North Florida less than a year.

Breakdancing, although very bad at it.

Hip-Hop fanatic!

I asked the Black girl in my class what she listened to hoping for the presumptious answer of the R&B/rap station Magic 95, but she said "Rock". I said "hard rock or soft". "Hard". Asked her about Quiet Riot and she never heard of them. (?!)

Remember seeing The Disco 3 on Video Soul. They announced they were going to change their name to The Fat Boys. Then they spat all over the place.

I began spitting all over the place.

The next door neighbor insisted on calling me a "Yankee".

I discovered the Lifetime Network and the Regis Philbin show. Thought I was on some underground shit.

Couldn't understand why I had gone from being the class comedian in Michigan to a total outcast in Florida.

Now know they were rednecks.

It was 1988, jeans were pegged and parachute pants were aplenty. I was a 5th grade student at Southern Elementary, here in Lexington, KY. I'm not sure what was big on the radio, but I owned 2 cassette tapes at the time: TMBG's debut LP and Fishbone's debut EP. I probably only knew who either of them were because of my dad.

I had a crush on a girl named Erin Gr4bh4m. Twice I had dreams of rescuing her from mountain lions wtf. Names kids called me: "Nicky Fumes" and "Stinkweed", insinuating that I smelled bad. I showered daily and even began wearing cologne, but they continued to berate me for my supposed consistant unpleasant odors. I promise I wasn't a farting machine or anything.

This year I had a friend whose name was also Nick, he was a year younger than me, and smaller, hence we were called "Big Nick" and "Little Nick". His sister was a 14 year old classic babe-in-disguise, her hotness masked by monstrous glasses and a horrible hairdo. (I remember this because it was around this time I got my first erection.) He shoplifted a LOT and after awhile I tried it too. I shoplifted a couple candy bars, a plastic parachute man, etc., until once my mom caught me and made me return the stuff to the store. I was then grounded for 2 weeks, during which time I took apart a crappy TV and never successfully put it back together.

(What I remember about 1998...A) I threw an awesome Halloween party, and B) I knocked up my girlfriend.)

Okay, sorry, back to 10 years old.

Oh yeah, crushes, schools, bands, and stuff...

In the 5th grade portion, I like some girl who's name I can't even remember now (lame). I kinda overheard her telling a mutual friend that she "liked that new guy because he looked like Ricky Shroder" (for the record, I grew up to look more like Gary Oldman -- oddly enough, I'm Mexican). Anyway, never had the balzac to make a 10 year old move on her.

In the 6th grade portion, I like Jennifer B, only because the puerto rican guy in the class told his friend that "she looked kinda good wearing a tie". This may've been my first lesson in fashion as a turn on. Frankly, she wasn't necessarily pretty, but just having someone else put her attire in a new perspective was enough to carry me for the whole year. We were nothing more than acquantances though.

During high school, my music partner had dated her in 9th grade or something. I had so many crushes during that span that I never even thought to mention to him that I had a crush on her in 6th grade.

As far as that 5th grade-9th grade era, I attended 8 schools in 5 years.

The Jacksonville Florida school system had these crappy "centers" instead of proper middle schools (6th grade center, 7th grade center, etc)...and my parents being new to Florida and haven't yet found their niche moved once a year in the middle of each year.

I always tried to get my friends into a "band" also. I'd scavenger their houe for "instruments", which always turned out to be their younger siblings toy piano or something. I was the jackass that'd actually try to charge neighborhood kids to watch us "perform" in the backyard.

Major fears at the time: probably quicksand, dinosaurs, and anything I'd seen/read in a scary book. (Somehow I managed to get my mother to let me read The Amityville Horror, which spooked me).

I'm going to visit that dam for the first time as an adult in two weeks.

I didn't know you were from Orange County. I'm sorry.

I had to create a recipe in a class using all metric measurements. I forgot to do it, so my recipe that I came up with at the last minute was 1 glass of 7-up and 1 scoop of Wyler's (powdered drink mix.) (Fuck me if that ain't metric too.)

It was a drought year and the president was telling everybody to conserve energy, so I remember being reminded and scolded a lot for wasting water and leaving lights on. It was hot all spring, summer, and fall, yellow and sere. I remember going down to the Valley with my dad and Yosemite Falls was a mere trickle.

I read or re-read a lot of history that year, Churchill, Bruce Catton, and various books on the Civil War. We had an old mattress on our porch that I would lay down on with my book and read, mostly oblivious to the mule deer on our 'lawn', or the raucous cries of the scrub jays. I wrote this a month or so ago about my cat at the time:

"...Trinka. I still picture her often sitting still, silent and leopard-like on the branch of an oak tree, her tortoise-shell coat the perfect camouflage in an early autumnal tree, so that the only thing that ever gave her away was the occasional flick of her tail. I remember her 'hunting' the deer and I remember the rage visible in her eyes when her gift of a bushbunny left a deep red stain in the middle of the white living room rug and she and it were tossed outside. I remember how she would very lightly rub her cool nose against mine to wake me in the middle of the night if she wanted me to pet her. I remember"..."'camping' on an old mattress on the front porch stubbornly refusing to re-engage with civilized living, watching the moon in the midnight blue sky strewn with millions of stars, and listening as Trinka, or the deer, or who knew what else rustled quietly through the yellowed grasses and crackling leaves in the penumbra."

My best friend was the son of the caretaker of the SDA summer camp across the South Fork of the Merced and about a mile down. Since we were godless hippies and his parents weren't always fond of sending him over and since my dad was often working, after school I'd go over to his place, where we had the run of the camp. We used to race golf carts up and down the property which snaked up a hill, or play starter pistol tag, which consisted of trying to sneak up on each other and shoot a starter pistol at the other. After an hour of creeping silently through a forest, when somebody surprises you by jumping out behind you and firing, the loud report maxes out your adrenaline and then reverberates eerily through the trees.

I went to grammar school about an hour outside the park in a town called Oakhurst. I remember scrimping loose change from around the house so that I, a lactose-intolerant child on a supposedly dairy-free diet, could buy an eskimo pie when I got off the school bus before my mile long hike back to our house. I listened to a radio station out of Fresno that played 60's and contemporary rock mostly but I remember loads of disco, some of which I liked and some of which I found boring. Looking at the top 40 for that year, I see some things that I liked at the time, but it wasn't a great year, musically for me.

That fall my mother tried to kidnap me for the last time, playing on my divided loyalties to her and to my father and I felt immensely guilty afterwards that, when faced with the choice of living with my heartbroken dad in Yosemite (his wife had recently left him) or my then-nutso mom, even more nutso step-father, and trapped brothers in the San Fernando Valley, I hadn't had the courage to be more forthright to my mother and tell her categorically that she lived in a dysfunctional household in one of the state's many armpits. More than any other thing, I hold that feeling of guilt against my mother, who should have known better.

Two years later we moved to Marin.

I just went back and reread that -- nothing twatty or self-important that I can make out: it just reads like a glimpse of a real life; it's coherent and it's moving, like so many others on this thread.

It's sounding twatty or self-important (or incoherent or just plain fucked up) that's preventing me from trying this... even though I love most of the entries here.

It's 1996-97. I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a quite dull suburb of DC. I'm quite happy. I'm in fifth grade at good old Somerset Elementary. My teacher is the same as last year, a friend of my family, who had his finger bitten off by a dead shark while living in the Marshall Islands (where I lived for half a year). He's a wonderful teacher - still sends us letters occasionally. I often stay behind after school to help clean up the room. I don't really know why, it's something that I do. Our class of 30 has 3 Ukrainians in it. More Ukrainians than blacks.

I'm still good friends with my neighbors, and my best friend lives in the house just down from mine. We play basketball sometimes, but he's a foot taller than me, and it's not the most fun thing in the world. I'm short, did I mention? Very short. My dad tells me that he was the shortest kid in his class for a long time.

We have guinea pigs. Lots of 'em. This may be the year we had 12.

I am woefully unaware of pop culture. I do love the Simpsons, but my family never watches sitcoms, and the only TV is in my parents' room. When I listen to the radio, it's either the oldies station or baseball games. It's not until 6th grade that my friends start extolling the virtues of No Doubt and Third Eye Blind. I have no concept of rap music. (I don't think I've fully stressed how very white my neighborhood is.) I barely listen to any music that my dad doesn't like. I feel somewhat ashamed when I turn out to like a song that my dad hates. Luckily for the future me, he liked a lot of great music.

I think my obsession with baseball is around its height at this point. The Orioles are my team, and I follow every game. They're actually good in 1996, and make it to the playoffs. I watch as Jeffrey Maier gives the Yankees a home run, and the team melts down. I wish death upon him. I play in little league - I think this is around when I started pitching. I was great - I could throw strikes, and since no one was used to hitting balls pitched by humans, I could strike people out all the time. Later, of course, they learned to hit, and my star dimmed gradually. I went back to playing the infield. I have a screen set up in my back yard, which I can pitch balls at, and they come back either in the air or as grounder, depending on where I throw it. I work out entire games in my head. I usually win.

I go to camp in Washington State at the end of fifth grade. My parents want me and my sister out of their hair as they help my grandparents move from their beautiful but horribly located home in Seattle to a nice but rather nondescript apartment. Camp is okay. I only seem to get the hang of it by the last few days. A number of the kids in my tents have just discovered swearing and girls, so you can imagine the conversations. I don't have much to contribute. I'm sad about losing my grandparents' house. There was a huge grey room on the bottom floor, filled with piping and old rubbish, where I could find all kinds of things, most notably an electric chord organ.

In school I'm probably irritatingly smart. I get placed in an elite vocabulary group with 3 or 4 other people. We get "existential" as a vocab word, and have a unit on banned books. This was the same school that last year assigned us to read an essay by Vaclav Havel, which had a number of veiled references to the dark secrets of European leaders. Of course, the banned books aren't all that dirty - one of them was banned for the use of the phrase "armpit fart." We have sex ed this year, and everyone's very giggly. I still feel terrible for suggesting that one of the girls in the video looks like a classmate of mine. She didn't actually get teased much about it, but it was a mean thing to do, and I like(d) her.

What am I reading? This one's tough. Most of my favorites - the Moomins, Five Children and It, Hitchhiker's Guide - I first read in third grade. I'm a huge Daniel Pinkwater fan. Occasionally I try pointing metal objects at my sister while saying, "You are in my power. You must obey." I'm probably reading a bunch of baseball-related books. I can't remember when I started reading Ray Bradbury, or when my dad recommended that I read The Circus of Dr. Lao. The idea of staying up late reading, far past my bed time, makes me happy. I love Pogo, thanks to my parents, but I haven't quite figured out Krazy Kat. My family has a tendency to talk in Pogo dialect amongst ourselves.

My family has a house in rural Virginia, which we visit on weekends. It's marvelous - I think there's still a creek flowing right by it into a swimming hole at this point, where my sister and I swim and catch tadpoles in the spring. It may be around this time that the first of two massive floods hits the region, floods that are only supposed to happen every 500 years. Massive mudslides occur on the Blue Ridge Mountains, houses are lost, the landscape looks markedly different. The place has changed drastically, and I just want it to go back to the way it was, and I know that it won't. Some things are repaired - the main river, which ended up flowing throwgh a cow pasture, is moved back within its banks, and our creek comes back for a time. Still wonderful, but not quite the same.

I may have been older than 10, but I want to write about this anyway. There's one day in Virginia when I start thinking about memory, about how most of what I see and think today is going to end up lost. So I decide to remember certain things. I remember a bee flying back and forth in the sun. I remember a small fish, swimming in the middle of the creek. I remember a flower petal on the ground, even though I decided not to choose to remember that one, as it would be trite and precious.

The end of elementary school makes me a bit sad. Well, not the end of school, but the horrible anticipation of middle school. No more recess is a pretty depressing thought. Near the end of fifth grade, in our music class, two twins in the class perform a song for us. I can't remember for the life of me what it was called, or what the lyrics or tune were. Something to do with fishing, maybe? But I find it tremendously moving. It gives me the image of people separated by water, or floating away. It feels like a farewell.

I don't think I've ever written this much about any one part of my life. This thread is amazing. I like that even the googlers feel inspired enough to tell a group of strangers all about their lives.

As I said way upthread:

...I've recently got a camera for the first time

And in digging through old photo albums and scanning some selections up onto Flickr I've got visual references for my post about being 10:

I would be living on the third floor of the duplex my family got at Mare Island, a naval base in the north part of San Francisco Bay.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3174/2674577905_44518a2a6d.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/2674577993_bb5552c0e3.jpg

I have my dear first hamster Tory in a cage opposite my bed

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/2674577943_f72edf76f1.jpg

(I still have and use that desk.)

Not referred to in that post but illustrative -- the family dog Sally:

Me in the middle of this Webelos den line-up, my dad right behind me:

Flowers near the back door steps:

...and happy birthday to me:

...since I actually got this camera for that tenth birthday.

Bah, totally forgot about the three photo limit. Once again:

Me in the middle of this Webelos den line-up, my dad right behind me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3230/2675397266_7857aff6c2.jpg

Flowers near the back door steps:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3158/2675397116_4e520ec866.jpg

...and happy birthday to me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3033/2675441754_beabea85c9.jpg

...since I actually got this camera for that tenth birthday.

Also, I realize that desk comment makes no sense without the second photo that should have gone with it:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3266/2674578019_e2d736e568.jpg

awesome tiger poster!

And Sally:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3138/2674577973_5a3c15c8e0.jpg