Tuesday, March 2nd 🌱

Favorite childhood memory for me was playing hide and seek, cops and robbers and "Patintero" with the neighbourhood kids in the streets when I was still living in the  Philippines.  I will play until the sun goes down in the afternoon and my mom will be shouting my name looking for me. We were in the north provincial part of the Philippines, Bulacan. 

We would run to the fields and steal mangoes and other fruits and the farmers will run after us. We would climb the hills with the views of the fields, settle down and eat our sweet luscious mangoes.

That was bliss, no iPads, no phones.

A generation that played real games and banter stories with each other.

571 words today. Big memories: traveling to the UK as a child and teenager and my obsession with Star Wars which lasted well into adulthood and then I moved to the Shire and lived there a good while and now I am with my own sub-creations which bring me to the present day. A food memory would be my grandfather's special hamburgers and eating butterscotch candies from the dish he and grandma had at their home. Earliest memory: being at their house while mom was coming from the hospital with my youngest sister (4 1/2 years younger than me) - all I really remember clearly is the doll dress I was playing with - red with a zipper down the front. Strange the things that stick in the mind. 

My favorite childhood memory,

Funny  but if you had asked me at the time I would say I hated it but now when I look back.." what you see from here is not the same as what you see from there"

I grew up in a farm in I Israel. My parents had an avocado grove. During the season we would spend all Saturday picking up avocado. It was just us the family. 

What I really remember is lunches at the grove. By noon we were all tired and hungry. My mother would pack a picnic basket with boiled eggs, olives, cut veggies, and a bureka (a dough filled with cheese) and we would picnic between the trees.

Do you too feel like your best memories has to do with food?

My grandfather was an outdoorsman.  Hunting, fishing, camping, and picking strawberries were some of his favorite things to do.  Pop-pop appreciated self-sufficiency and did his best to teach me the value of feeding yourself from the wild.  Going clamming down-the-shore was a common and frequent pastime for him and his 11 brothers and sisters in the summers.  They always brought home baskets of clams and stories.  Like the story of that big nurse shark that swam between pop-pop’s legs as his feet searched for clams in the soft muck of the bay.

I spent a lot of time with my grandfather when I was young.  A long summer weekend with pop-pop was like heaven to me.  Sitting on the kitchen floor, we churned ice cream with fresh-picked strawberries.  We nurtured new chicks in a cardboard box in the dining room until they were old enough to go outside.  And we ate raw clams at the kitchen sink.

Pop-pop would lift me up and plop me down on the counter next to the sink.  Bare feet dangling and rhythmically bumping into the cabinets below.  My long black hair pulled back into a pony tail with wisps sticking to my sweaty face.  

As I sat and watched, Pop-pop skillfully eased open the shells of the clams, popping off the top shell, loosening the muscles from the shell.  One for him.  One for me.  Together we slurped the clams and their juices from the shells.  Briny water dripping off our chins as we tossed empty shells into the bowl destined for the compost pile as we finished each one.  Just in time to move on to the next.  

I’ll never forget the light that shone from his eyes when we were together.  I have no idea how many clams we would eat in a sitting, but we stayed there at the kitchen sink until we had our fill.  My pop-pop grinning at my joy and enjoying the delicious satisfaction of feeding us both.

2383 - I still have "other duties" to do today, but the writing is done. 

The summer between high school and service, I got a job on a dragger out of Portland, ME. My neighbor worked the boat and they needed a hand for the summer season. The captain was a short, round man of Italian descent, up from Gloucester (pronounced "glaw-ster"). Always had a nasty black Parodi cigar in his mouth. Every morning at 2am, Jake would pick me up and take me into town so we could hunt the skipper down. Usually we found him on the first try, but sometimes we had to wake up a couple of women before found him. 

We'd roll him onboard, prop him in the wheelhouse, and get underway. He hung out of the window (the sash dropped from the top half), one hand on the wheel and the other elbow hooked over the sash. 

"Gaw-fee." His voice owed a lot to bullfrogs and the decades of Parodis didn't help. "Gaw-fee," he'd say. "Bring me gaw-fee."

I watched sunrises over the Gulf of Maine as we put out the first haul of the day and sorted the catches into the holds when we hauled them back aboard. The fish weren't plentiful, even then, but it was how they earned their living. I learned how to cook fresh shrimp on the engine's muffler and the difference between capicola and prosciuitto. I learned how to mend the nets by holding the twine tight in my toes, which amused the rest of the crew no end because I was ambidextrous with the twine needle, swapping hands with each row. It made my patches hang funny but as long as the knots held, it didn't matter.

By the time August rolled around, I knew I wouldn't be going to school again in the fall in spite of having been accepted to the local trade school to be a chef. The war in Vietnam was still hot. The draft a fact of life for any male over 18. Since I'd graduated from high school at 17, I had a brief window of opportunity and enlisted in the Coast Guard before my number could be drawn. My father had to come to the recruiter's office and co-sign for me. He gave me a hard look but he did it.

That summer, 1970, was the last summer before I had to start growing up. The work was smelly, uncomfortable, and hard.The days long, and more dangerous than I knew at the time. 

The dragger fleets are gone now. Eastern rigged side trawlers exist only in museums and Wikipedia, in rebuilds as pleasure craft and models. A way of life that I grew up with no longer there. Only the memories of long days, rough twine, slippery fish, and a skipper hanging out of the wheelhouse demanding gaw-fee in the pre-dawn light. 

Fond memories, but bittersweet.

Image from: https://goodmorninggloucester.com/2011/04/01/last-of-the-wooden-eastern-rigged-side-draggers/

As someone who was bullied for the majority of her childhood, I have so many fond memories despite the painful ones.

The fondest ones are the summers I spent at my grandma's summer house. Playing by the creek. Collecting frogs and having frog races with my cousin. Eating fresh berries straight off the bushes. Lazy afternoons in the room up in the attic. Mushroom foraging. Laying in the long grass, watching the clouds roll by. Listening to the crickets and trying to spot them. Looking out for deer by the side of the forest.

It was a total childhood wonderland!