Friday, May 10, 2019

My earliest memories

My earliest memory may be of a tire swing hanging from a tree with water sloshing around the bottom.  Another early memory is that next door there were three French-Canadian boys, the youngest being Rene, but we called him Weenie.

I remember a lot of smells from when I was very young.  One was of popcorn from when we went to the movies.  Another was the diesel fumes from a bus.  And several were from the year we spent in England when I was about four.  Visiting Britain years later, I recognized the smells of coal smoke, greengroceries, butcher shops.

I remember some TV commercials from my early childhood.  There was the Ajax cleanser commercial showing an armoured knight on a horse, which scared me. (Trailers for westerns also scared me.) And there was this commercial for Hands-up Harry, a gunfighter you'd shoot at.  You could shoot off his guns and his hat, and if you hit him just right his pants would fall down!

When I was little, we had a lot of Classics Illustrated comic books.  One was of William Tell, but the only thing I remembered was this moment when a man carried a woman out of a burning castle. (It also had a brief story about the pirate Jean Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans.) Just the other week I read that comic again for the first time in about 50 years, and my memory was right--it does have the man rescuing the woman from the burning building!

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