CHILDHOOD MEME
(Picked this up on Michelle's
blog)
14 November 2005
1. What was the first car your family had?
A Plymouth. I don’t know what year it was.
(This may have been my parents' honeymoon picture)
2. What was the name of your first pet and why?
Socksie was a black kitten with white paws that the guy who owned the local
supermarket gave my mother to take home with me when he heard I was sick with the measles.
I don’t know how long we had Socksie, but he eventually ran away. He came back one
rainy night to get warm and be fed and then left again and we never saw him again. About
that time they discovered my sister was allergic to animal hair, so we never had anther
pet, until I got married.
3. What did you want to be when you grew up?
Lots of things--a nurse, a poll worker (really!), a mother, a nun, a dog trainer.
4. What was the name of your elementary school?
St. Brigid’s, a catholic school in San Francisco.
5. Who was your first best friend?
Stephen Calegari lived around the corner from us and our mothers were friends.
All together now: awwwww
(look at the curls on that girl!)
I didn’t have a good female friend until my horizons expanded in
kindergarten and I met Gayle Tarzia. Ultimately, Gayle and I used to walk to school
together every morning.
6. Are you still friends today, and if not, what happened?
I heard from Stephen a couple of years ago after I found his e-mail address and wrote
to him, following a grammar school reunion neither of us attended. I haven’t heard
from Gayle in years and years and years. We attended different high schools and drifted
apart.
7. What was your favorite board game?
Monopoly. We played endless games of Monopoly and my mother usually skunked
us!.
8. Did you play house or other make believe games?
I had a very active imagination and when I was little loved playing games like that.
9. Were you a Dungeons and Dragons geek?
I’m very old. There was no Dungeons and Dragons when I was growing up.
10. Did you sleep with stuffed animals as a kid?
I don’t think I did. I don’t remember playing with stuffed animals as much
as I did dolls, harkening back to #8.
11. Do you still sleep with stuffed animals?
No. Sometimes I have a well-fed dog in my lap, but that’s about it.
 12. Who was the first person you looked up to when you
were younger?
Wow....so far back. I had nuns who were inspirations, but I don’t know if they
were the first people I looked up to. I read a lot of lives of the saints
when I was an impressionable grammar school kid and was very inspired by St. Therese of Lisieux.
At one point I wanted to be a Carmelite nun (which idea I laugh at now!)
 13.
Who was your favorite relative?
My maternal grandmother. Grandma Scott had 32 grandchildren and yet could make each
one feel like her special child. I loved that lady.
14. Were you short or tall in elementary school?
Average height, above average weight. Got a lot of teasing for being fat.
15. Were you teased in school?
LOL. See above. Yeah--I was the one people loved to poke fun at..
 16.
What was the name of your favorite teacher?
Sister Anne, my typing teacher in high school. Jeri was named for her and she and I
remained friends until she died of Hodgkins Lymphoma, just a few months before Ned and
Marta were married, in 1992. I was happy that I was able to spend some time with her
a few years before she died.
17. What was the name of your least favorite teacher?
Miss Williams, who was my history teacher. She was a mid-year replacement for a very
vivacious, energetic woman who adored history and made it live for us. When she
left to get married, Miss Williams came on board, appalled at how little we had learned.
She had a very laconic manner of speech and I remember spending the rest of that year
memorizing dates and hating it.
18. What was your best subject in school?
Typing and English. Which has obviously served me in good stead throughout my life.
19. What was your worst subject in school?
Math. No question. Don’t you DARE give me any "story problems" to
solve or you’ll see me dissolve right in front of you. If Train A and Train B leave
at certain times and travel at certain speeds, I don’t give a damn when they crash
into each other or how many people are thrown off the train.
20. Did you do well in Physical Education?
I detested Physical Education and somehow managed to avoid it throughout most of my
schooling. When I got to college and discovered it was required, I found out that
"social dancing" counted as a P.E. course and took that (there was a time when I
could do a mean cha-cha!)
21. Were you clumsy when you were younger?
Is the Pope Catholic? Was, am, always will be. Just ask Peggy.
22. Who was your favorite band as a kid?
Oh lord. Bands. I don’t know. But Judy Garland was my favorite singer!
23. What was your favorite movie as a kid?
A Star Is Born. I saw it first in 1954, when I was 10 years old, and 50+ years
later it remains my favorite movie and I have probably seen it more than 100 times..
24. Did your parents read to you?
Yes. I remember one Christmas when my mother read A Christmas Carol to Karen
and me. She would read to us when we were sick. Those were special times.
25. Did you have a favorite book?
Not "A" special book, but I loved anything by Albert Payson Terhune (who
wrote about collies) and Walter Farley (who wrote the Black Stallion Books). I also loved
Dorothy Lyons books, especially Silver Birch and Midnight Moon, which were
books about horses.
 26. What was
your favorite restaurant as a kid?
I don’t remember liking the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco
for dinner and Blum's on Polk Street for special dessert-type treats (they made great ice
cream)
27. What TV or movie star did you have a crush on?
Judy Garland.
28. Do you now wonder what you were thinking?
Not at all. I still love watching her.
29. Who was your first crush in school?
Stephen, my first friend. There was nobody else around.
30. As a child, what kind of car did you want when you grew up?
I don’t know that I thought much about brands of cars. Probably just as well,
since I’ve never had a car that was just mine.
31. Did your parents spank you?
Yes, but I was the "good" child, so I didn’t get spanked nearly as
much as my sister did. My father believed that you weren’t really sorry unless you
cried, and I could cry at the drop of the hat. Karen, on the other hand, was determined
she would not let him see her cry. He sometimes would beat her with a rubber hose until
she finally cried.
32. Did your parents fight a lot when you were a kid?
Yes. My father was not an easy man to get along with
33. Did your parents get divorced or stay married?
It took 35 years, but my mother finally found a man who loved her and appreciated her
and treated her the way she deserved to be treated. I was very happy for her when she
finally divorced my father.
My mother, Fred, and all their grandchildren
35. Did you ever run away from home?
No.
36. How old were you when/if you first got glasses?
I was 10. I should have had them earlier, as I had amblyopia but I guess they
didn’t do vision testing on young kids then. You can apparently reverse amblyopia if
you catch it before the age of 10. I remember having to wear an "occluder," a
black plastic cover that went over my "good" eye in order to strengthen my
"bad" eye--but I’m 62 years old and I still have a good eye and a bad eye,
though the "good" eye is now probably about what the "bad" eye was
like when I was 10!
37. Did you need braces or a retainer?
No. In fact, when I went to a new dentist, at age 12, he was so impressed at how
straight my teeth were without braces that he took me to an orthodontist in his building
to show him that it was possible to have naturally straight teeth..
38. When did you get your period or hit puberty?
I was 13. I knew all about it, but my godmother had just died of ovarian cancer and I
was convinced I had cancer.
39. Both sexes, when did you start shaving?
Can’t remember
40. Girls, when did you start wearing a bra?
I don’t remember when I got my first bra, but I was a year younger than all of
my classmates in grammar school, so I matured later and I remember the horrendous
embarrassment of having my friends reach under my blouse to check out whether I had
anything yet.
41. What was your first kiss like?
I can’t even remember. It was with my boyfriend, Bill Farrington, but I have no
memory of when it happened.
42. What did you do on your first date?
We went to see a Tab Hunter movie in downtown San Francisco. One of us was late, I
don’t remember which. We each came by bus and met at the theatre.
43. How old were you when you first drank?
My father always served me a little bourbon with ginger ale when there was a grown up
party. Nobody thought anything about it at the time. Never a lot, just enough for me to
sip and feel sociable.
Me (look at that figure!) drinking champagne
at home at age 17..nobody gave it a thought.
44. Where was your first house?
My parents were living in a rented flat in San Francisco when I was born and they
didn’t move out of it and into a house until after Ned was born. Maybe after David
was born!
|
