Monday, August 27, 2018

Siblings' Memories


I have been kidding my siblings with what I have been writing about them and I can get John going every single time when I say that he was the one that said he could remember being an egg.  I love to tease him . . . usually he takes it in his sardonic way but I think maybe I am embarrassing him so --- no, he never said that!
My brother Peter was making his own recollections the other day when suddenly John said “remember the Popeye punching bag?”  Both of us sat up and said “Yeah, now that you mention it!”  Both John and Peter loved that bag which they had for years.
I had been telling the story of my passive upbringing the first 3 years of my life.  Mom and Dad were going to raise their children on “modern lines” which included “no fighting” (gasp).  I was asking Mom if the picture of me standing on the bed was the day Dad found me being slapped by another girl.  “No, she said, that happened in Thisted”.  What happened was my parents were entertaining a couple who had also brought along their little girl.  Dad happened to walk into the bedroom where we were playing and found me standing in the middle of the room while the other girl slapped my face.  I made no move to defend myself and Dad had an absolute shock.  He had trained me so well in not hitting that I had no idea that I could defend myself.  (It explains a lot, actually).  I then looked at John and asked if he remembered having to be untrained and he said “not in a million years, I never had any idea of not defending myself” and we all laughed because we knew it was true.
It’s a little ironic because as I have written, we did fight with each other but it only began after Dad “corrected” his error about hitting.  It is one thing not to hit but it’s a totally different thing not to defend yourself.  I don’t remember any of it, to be honest (i.e. about either “induction”) but the anecdote was told to me fairly young and that story sticks with me as a bit of a symbol of how I get things in a very literal way.

Tomorrow I will talk about language.

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