Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Surviving my childhood Part 1


I know we have our share of crazy stories to tell from childhood. Time to tell mine.

My dad is a recovering alcoholic. He has been sober for about 14 years now. My mom worked at her own ceramic shop full time. My dad also had a full time job. How he was able to go to work everyday still remains a mystery.

As a kid, if my mom was working nights, like she sometimes did, it was up to my dad to watch my brother and I. He watched us through beer goggles, so we pretty much got to do whatever we wanted. Hell, even sober, he didn't really care what we did.

He had some old collectors trucks in our back yard. He was going to restore them. You know.. someday. My brother, my cousin and myself would go in the back yard, which also served as a trash burning pit, and jump from top of truck to top of truck. We would also attempt to push each other in the fire. No one ever got hurt, thank God, but we could have.

When we got older, my dad used to let us drive the old Vega station wagon. On our street which was never very populated (unlike now) My brother, who is 3 years older than I, would drive, and I would ride on the roof holding on to the luggage rack. Don't worry, my dad was in the passenger seat, so it was OK!

When I was 12, my dad let me drive. My brother rode on the roof. As I was pulling into the driveway, I got mixed up with the gas and brake, so as I approached the pine tree I panicked and floored the brake gas pedal. I heard my brother all 'George-of-the-Jungle' like "watch out for that tree" But, it was too late. I hit it, not with full force because somehow I managed to let off the gas before we hit.. maybe at 15 MPH. My brother was able to stay on the roof.

When I was about 6, I was riding in one of my dads old cars. I can't remember what it was, but back then, there were no seatbelts.I was leaning against the door for whatever reason. The door wasn't shut tight. We went around a corner and you guessed it, I fell out of the car and rolled acrossed the road. Lucky for me, he was sober and we weren't driving very fast. Otherwise, he might have left me there.

If one of us kids got hurt, dad's solution for anything bleeding was to pour alcohol on it. Straight from the bottle. So of course, after we got back to the house, he emptied half a bottle of rubbing alcohol on my wounds.

There is a big hill in my neighborhood (I still live on the same street I grew up on) I tied my Big Wheel to the back of my bike and my cousin and I took off for the hill. She rode the Big Wheel. We were going pretty fast down the hill when she fell off. Her foot got caught and I dragged her for about 25 feet before I realize those were screams of terror and pain, not of joy that I was hearing. We managed to get her back to the house where my dad "took care" of the wounds. My cousin hated him for a while.

If my mom was home and he was passed out (though just yesterday he claimed he was exhausted and sleeping) with a beer in his hand, my mom would show us how to take the full beer can from his limp hand and dump it in the sink and return it without waking him up. That became our nightly entertainment. We would also find his beer that he would hide from Mom and "dump" it. Sometimes it was a 12 pack, sometimes just a 6. Needles to say, as teenagers, we were popular with the neighborhood kids when we found the beer in the woods.

Hide and seek was always fun. We played in the house. My dad would help one of us climb into the attic. No stairs or ladder, just shelves that my mom used for her "trash for cash". But that's a whole other story, one for another blog post.

He would help us climb the shelves so we didn't have to bother him anymore. He would help us climb into the top of the narrow linen closet. It was IMPOSSIBLE to find someone, because there was no light. If you giggled... you were toast.

Dad also has a few poems that he could only recite when he was drunk, they were funny as hell, but I can't find them on the internet. One of my favorites is "Pierre Hunts the Skunk" absolutely hilarious, but as many times as I have heard it, I can't remember it. I am going to have to get him drunk one night so he can recite it, then I'll write it down


WOW! This post was longer than I intended it to be, but if you stayed to the end, thank you.

I will post some of my "Mom adventures" another time

8 comments:

WeaselMomma said...

A. I love the button.
2. This was hysterical. And frightening. And brought back memories of my childhood with a smile + a gratitude that I am not raising my children in the same environment that I grew up in.

Moooooog35 said...

Wait...you took the beer AWAY from your alcoholic father??

Man..hindsight is SO 20/20.

Mike said...

As humorous as some of this was, it was also very frightening to hear some of the things that you went through.

Welcome back to the world of the blogging insane people!

SkylersDad said...

I am looking forward to hearing more scary stories of your childhood! Mine usually involved either building some type of ramp for our bikes to jump off, or playing in abandoned mines.

ReformingGeek said...

Whew! I'm glad you made it to adulthood.

Unknown said...

WeaselMomma Thank you.. I saw it and KNEW it was perfect for the post. I am amazed tht I made it through. I am glad I could bring a smile and hopefully good memories back.

Mooooooog.. I know.. whodathunkit?

Otin.. Yeah I look back now and just shake my head. Thanks for the welcome back! I missed it a LOT

Chris. You are why I posted that.
I hope you made it through with minimal broken bones

RG Well.. I don't know about 'adult'hood.. I just managed to live to see my late 30's. I refuse to be considered an adult

J.J. in L.A. said...

There was a big hill behind our house too. I was in a full-length leg cast one year. We (2 brothers, a friend of theirs, my best friend and I) decided to take a walk.

Thinking it was funny, the friend (theirs, not mine) let go of the wheelchair at the top of the hill and I started to fly down. One of the brothers finally caught up with me and grabbed the hand grips. I didn't try to grab the wheels because I knew I would've been catapulted into the air.

For the rest of the year, that guy bent over backwards to make it up to me. He even gave me the heimlich maneuver when I choked on a fish stick. lol!

Oh yeah! And we always painted dad's toenails whenever he fell asleep watching Johnny Carson...which was a LOT.

Anonymous said...

I don't remember it as that much fun and I'm learning things I didn't know which is probably a good thing. I don't know how we all survived. Remember the time he tripped and broke his ankle at the lake down the street? But he never dropped his beer.
MOM

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