tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?
When I was a kid, I remember coming home from a summer vacation. We had loaded up the camper and driven down to Florida and come home up the eastern seaboard.
On the trip, I remember staying at the Kon Tiki campground, body surfing in the Atlantic and getting incredibly sunburned.
On the trip home, our northbound trip seemed to be paralleling a hurricane. We managed to avoid it until we got to Washington DC where our paths collided. The campground flooded, we visited all the memorials - which were almost empty, well, because of the HURRICANE. Fortunately, Washington didn’t close in those days - so we had a great adventure and had most of the tour guides to ourselves.
The rain followed us most of the way back to Tecumseh, where coming in to town we were greeted by police cars. It turns out that the rain from the hurricane had swollen the Mill Pond and threatened to flood the River Raisen. The sun was shining, though, so I don’t remember it being too big of a deal.
Once we got home, we all unloaded out of the wagon. When I got out, I spied something “unusual.” There was some kid I’d never seen riding Phil Wanzek’s bike down our front sidewalk! I promptly charged him and knocked him off the bike accusing him of stealing the bike.
It turns out that a family had moved into the neighborhood while we were on our trip. Joe Royal and Phil had made friends while we were gone and were sharing the bike.
It was the first change that I’d ever seen happen to our neighborhood and it took me by surprise.
Years of pickup kickball games, block wide hide and seek games, weekend camping trips with the Royals, Wanzeks, Getzs, Durkees, Hamiltons, Fosbenders and Beardsleys defined my childhood.
After the Royals moved in, for the life of me, I can’t recall anyone else moving in or out of the little neighborhood bounded by the Union, the Boulevard, Patterson school and the creek.
