@lynnventura I love your story. I love thinking about you as a passionate little girl with dreams and a mother who would move heaven and earth to help you realize them. She must have loved you so much and been so proud of the woman you have become.
What an amazing thread!
I have one that was almost Traumatic, but mainly just odd.
We lived on an island, and there was a tropical storm moving in. My Pops drove me, my teenage sister, and her boyfriend out onto a pier, to look at the wild waves that the storm was stirring up. I was three years old. The pier was made of granite boulders, with a long narrow asphalt roadway on top. We drove out to the end and they all got out. The wind was rocking the car, and they could barely stand up. I was laughing at my sisters boyfriend- his enormous blonde afro was flopping all around in the funniest way. Pops ordered me to stay in the car, and keep all the windows up.
But you know me.
As soon as he turned his back, i opened the windows. The wind felt so cool and moist. It felt so nice, as it caressed me, and gently lifted me off of the back seat and right out of the window. I guess i was too young to be as terrified as i should have been. I floated over the car, over the heads of my family. Before i could say "hey look at me!", my sister saw me, and started screaming like Veronica Lake in The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Pops leapt into the air and caught me by my ankle. A few more seconds, and i would have been out to sea. He was yelling at me the whole way home, as i pouted. "We almost lost you! How the hell would I explain *that* to your Mother?!?" I told him he could "just tell her i flew away" .
@unk-p Do you think it's possible you were levitating? I remember vividly jumping out of my body and soaring at an early age. No one was ever around to grab me and I'd float back down.
@lynnventura
@jeanne-mayell @bluebelle @lovendures @unk-p
Jeanne, this topic is wonderful. I'm enjoying your story and all the other stories from folks who wrote one here. Your father's arrival and closing of the door and putting out the fire was something else! So heartwarming, inspiring and truly amazing.
Lynn, your story made me laugh because I had such a similar feeling about Samantha too.
I also grew up in the 60s and "fell" for Superman. I thought to myself that I SHOULD BE ABLE TO FLY too! So I got my mother to take me to Woolworths and buy me a superman cape. (I believe I was probably 7 yrs old). Well one day I put on that superman cape and climbed on top of the dining room hutch. I felt I was sure I could fly so I jumped off the hutch with my superman cape on. Well, of course things didn't go the way I planned. I hurt my ankle pretty bad and was lucky I didn't break an arm or leg or any other part of me. My mother was not happy that's why I wanted the cape, and I assured her I wouldn't be jumping off anything else thinking I could fly.
I still want to fly though lol..... ?
@triciact I love this! I wanted to fly too!
My Star Trek-loving brother built a phaser and was convinced he could use it to communicate. He wasn't wrong, just a few decades early, because we're all using them now.
I think we all have memories from the "home office," where we could fly and make things happen just by thought. And I think the people who created a lot of these TV shows had them too.
I love your Woolworth's story too. That place was amazing. For all you youngsters, it was Target before Target. My Cuban parents called it "El Tencen," which is an adaptation of the English "ten cents," or the "five and dime." To a lot of Spanish-speaking people, Woolworth's was always "El Tencen."
Cheers all!
@triciact Ah, what a sweet story. And if fits the spirited Triciact I know that you'd get up there on that high place and make the leap. I see you as someone who can and does defy gravity.
@triciact and @lynn, I love that you brought up Woolworths!
When I was eight I walked a mile from my house to the Woolworths in town and bought my mother a pink wallet with silver glitter for Mother's Day.
And my earliest Woolworth's memory was when I was five and my mom and I happened to be in a Woolworths that had a soda counter that was having a promotion for kids only for banana splits. There were blown up balloons all along the wall behind the counter. If you picked the right balloon you could get a banana split for a penny. My mother said we should try it. So I stared at all these balloons - red, pink, purple, and noticed there were a few really dingy-colored green balloons.
I thought, "I bet they think the kids will pick a red balloon, and no one will pick that green one.
So I picked the dingy green balloon, they popped it, and inside was a ticket that said one cent. My mother was thrilled and since I was a skinny little kid who couldn't eat more than two spoonfuls of this enormous dish, she ate the rest.
Well the only way I choose to defy gravity now is by getting on an airplane (LOL), however I just remembered that Woolworths also had popcorn by the bag and candy apples, in addition to penny candy. (My mother didn't allow me to have much candy but she let me get the popcorn). There were also these toys called "color forms" which bring back a happy memory and you could buy the whole game set for only $1!
Another funny thing about Woolworths was that they sold house slippers. The kind you definitely wore in the house, but had a hard bottom, and would never go to special events in. When I got married, my Aunt Sue (my father's half sister) showed up at the wedding wearing - yikes - those house slippers from Woolworths! We were all dressed up to the nines of course, and on top of that, she insisted in being in the front line of all the pictures with those darn house slippers. We still laugh about that (she was quite the character and very cheap!).
Every time I hear "Woolworths" I want to drag out our wedding photos and laugh about dear departed Aunt Sue. LOL ? ?
When I was 3 I got to chose my first pet. I chose this beautiful part siamese part rag-doll kitten that had a slight kink in it's tail. He was an amazing cat. He looked both ways when crossing the street, let me dress him in baby doll clothes and stroll him around my home and would stay with me night and day when I was sick. He lived 16 years.
He was an indoor/outdoor cat who loved to capture animals and bring them home as presents, often leaving his catch on our doorstep. Lizards, birds, rodents and the like. Years later when we got a dog, he would actually woof back at the dog if he got cornered. I have never seen anything like it to this day, a barking cat.
Sometimes at night I would be sitting in the kitchen in the dark and the top cupboard door of a cabinet would swing open slowly and 2 glowing eyes would stare back at me. He loved to hide in cabinets but it could be a bit freaky sometimes. haha.