we are gathered here today to celebrate and reminisce
I was thinking about what to write my 3rd Feelgood post about, and then - for some reason - I got nostalgic.
So let's talk childhood memories.
We all have them. Some are good, some are bad (in those instances, a good memory is unpardonable, as my favourite heroine says). Let's talk good memories.
Like the time we all went to the Brussels Museum of Natural History to look (mainly) at the dinosaurs.
The time when I was ten and we were on a holiday and my dad gave me a pendant of lapis lazuli, which I held on to for about 7 years (and is now sadly no longer in my possession).
Oh, or when my mom and me actually connected about something (which is hard, admittedly, for a grown-up woman and a 12-year-old child) over how sad and sweet A Little Princess was, and how we both cried.
(or that time, several years later, when we both swooned over Jon Bon Jovi's appearance in Ally McBeal)
My, in retrospect, highly disturbing childhood.
Even the not so good memories gain some lustre over the years.
It horrified me at the time, but when I think of Roald Dahl's The Witches now, I'm smiling. At the time I was 7 or 8 years old and very moved by the book. In a bad, scary scary way.
For several weeks nothing or nobody could convince me that the Upper Witch was not, in fact, hiding behind my closet, waiting to eat me. I think my hygiene actually suffered (for they only smell clean children).
I didn't even dare watch the movie version until I was 13 or 14.
The stuff of nightmares. That's Angelica Houston, by the way. I'm just saying. Also, mice!
The soundtrack of my youth, too, is something precious to me.
I hadn't any musical preference at all until I was 15.
When we went on holiday (which, with just 1 exception, was invariably to some part of France, and always by car), my dad would play Marco Borsato (back when he still made really beautiful songs that actually meant something), Stef Bos, who is to this day a favourite with me, and Crowded House, whose lyrics I had even MORE difficulty understanding. Mrs. Hairy Legs? Is that what they're singing, dad? I don't get it. What is... what?
In fact, even though he, for years and years, detested the way I dressed (all goff and individual), he was the one who introduced me to the scene, by way of an Evanescence CD, which at first, he would play (in a darkened room, I kid you not!) and I would hate, and then somehow I started to like it.
conformist!! Like, yeah, dude!
I still like Evanescence. It's like ice pops and certain children's novels. Like how I wanted to dye my hair bright orange when I was 14 (incidentally on the last family vacation before my parents divorced) because Rose McGowan had hers bright orange on Charmed, and I loved her
RAWR.
But I believe I'm somehow steering into melancholy.
The apartment is ours, as I wrote yesterday, and on the very month that we take possession of it, it will be two years since I spoke to my father.
Sometimes I wish I could invite him to come see my new house (and The Boy) when we're settled in, just like my mom and her new partner are coming to see it.
I don't know how to fix the problems we had, and still have. I don't know how to make contact when, in truth, I don't want it all back to the way it was, because I felt terrible back then. I just want for us to occasionally call each other. I want to know whatever big thing happens, even if I'm not included in the small ones.
If I ever get married, I want to invite him to the wedding. If I ever have a child, I want him or her to know their granddad.
Good things come to those who wait?
We shall see.
Goodnight.
Great post.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if your dad is waiting for the same thing. Perhaps someday you'll feel up to starting with just a phone call and then you can build from there.
Love the South Park picture. Too funny!
I wonder too sometimes. I don't feel up to anything so huge-seeming like a phone call though :( A card on his birthday, maybe?
ReplyDeleteHehe, I LOVE the goth kids on South Park :p