So life has a lot going on for me at the moment, but I did find one interesting thing-I spoke to my Dad recently and found out he didn't have any pictures-at all-from my childhood. Not one. He recently raided his mother's stock just to be able to say he had a photo.

These things happen when you divorce. Someone always has to lose custody of the memories.

Anyway, I have one photo album from when I was a kid, and I dug out that album and scanned some of them in so that I could send them off to Dad. Angus and I use a service called Photobox which works pretty well-you upload your order and get the prints within 2 days. As we want to get some prints from the Seattle/Canada holiday to my dad, we figured we could scan in some prints of my young 'un days and get them to him, too (but only up until about age 9, because after that the looks go downhill fast for most of the pubescent and pre-pubescent years. Seriously. I know we all go through a phase where our limbs look like they don't fit and our hair echoes of some bad 80's teen TV show starring Nancy McKeon and Sarah Jessica Parker, but I dwelled in that phase a lot longer than most. It ain't pretty and it certainly isn't going public.)

This might bore the everloving shit out of you, but someone once asked if I had any pictures of me as a kid, and...well...I do. You might look at them and wonder what the hell happened, how did I go from being a cute kid to the bus accident that I am today, and my only response is that everything I learned I learned from TV, so perhaps there's your answer.

I was born on the first of April, 1974. According to my mother, at the time I was only one of two babies in the nursery. The other baby was a black baby, and this being the Deep South (yes, I was born in the Deep South), it meant I got held the entire time by the three nursery nurses and the other baby apparently didn't (and this still makes me sad today as it is honestly hideously unfair and wrong on so many levels. I wonder what happened to that baby. I'm sure he's actually the well-adjusted happy-go-lucky adult today, I'm facing the bad karma.)

Here's me and my dad (whom I think looks like a thug in this pic, but what can I say, he was just a kid himself) and a cool Bakelite-looking TV hanging on the wall.

.

I was a pretty easygoing kid, being all ok with playing with a pair of old flip-flops and everything.

We soon moved from that place in the Deep South to Lubbock, Texas. This was a mistake for many reasons:

1) It was Lubbock, Texas
2) It was Lubbock, Texas
3) I was exposed to Cujo

Cujo won. It was an ugly battle, really.

I've said before that I was a clumsy git and that's true-if I could break it, it would get broken. Thanks to the pancake-flat Asian profile I inherited, I would walk into walls and wind up with black eyes. I did this a lot, actually, and any other number of things, like look behind me while running and playing tag so that I completely and utterly missed the bench in front of me and tripped over it, sliding on my face.

It sure made for a banner "use Helen on the Christmas card" year.

Most of my pictures are from McChord AFB in Washington. Here's one of me and our former family dog, a loving and absolutely wonderful Sheltie named Tigger. Tigger was the perfect family dog, although sadly he did not protect his family from an attack launched by macrame.

There were no survivors.

I told you I grew up Catholic and I wasn't dicking around (oops, sorry God.) I maintain the mantra of Catholic guilt but the rest of it is gone. At least I got to wear a tiara once in my life, even if I never wore one for any weddings (mine or other women's that is.)

Oh my god those shoes. Those shoes. And it was definitely before Labor Day in this picture, so I was really giving the finger to fashion here.

And the final picture is, I think, a real tribute to the fight against misogynies of today's patriarchal societies. From a tender and fragile age I embraced the slogan of the solidarity of women and the compelling need of the empowerment to which my sex require. You'll be happy to know, Ilyka and Genni, that I embraced radical feminism from a very early age...

...all in the guise of Miss Piggy, and while surrounded by a sea of pink.

I never said I was perfect.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 06:58 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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