I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents lately. They had me when they were middle-aged, and they’re now in their mid-60s. I know they won’t be around forever, and that thought creeps into my brain more and more often as the months go by. I find myself wanting to preserve whatever stories they had to tell, and even though it seems like I heard them all a million times as a kid, I can hardly remember many of them now.
Mom isn’t very technically-minded, although she has the hang of Solitaire, email, and Facebook (much to my chagrin! LOL). Dad, however, has always been pretty geeky and open to — even excited about — new technologies, so I realized today that I should ask him to start a blog. He wouldn’t necessarily write about current events…I’m more interested in him putting down in his own words the stories of his life, and transcribing those seemingly random vignettes of memory that we all have from time to time when our brain isn’t focused on anything in particular.
I suppose it would be a good habit to get into myself, actually; when my mind wanders, I recall the damnedest things — moments that, for one reason or another, are indelibly pressed into my brain.
For instance, the other day I was walking Lola in the bright sunshine, and I thought about getting sunburned. Then I remembered this time when I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9 years old…
It was a hot Southern summer, and I was out of school. I took this picnic-blanket-thing that was soft on one side and plastic on the other, and I laid it out on the grass in the backyard. It was so bright out that I folded up one corner and laid it over my face as I lay there looking at the clouds. Then, stupid me, I got so relaxed I fell asleep. I couldn’t have been out for that long, since Mom hadn’t come looking for me yet, but it was long enough. I looked like a boiled lobster, and just on one side! In the days after came the blistering and peeling — oh, the joys of being a fair-skinned redhead. That lesson was learned, needless to say!
Of course, as a kid, I was always upset that I didn’t tan like the rest of my friends, so I tried whatever I could. My childhood felt like one failed tanning experiment after another, even including self-tanning lotion. I was probably in high school before I finally gave up and resigned myself to the fact that all I’d ever get were freckles or blisters. Typically, now, I love my skin. 🙂
