Memories from home.

Here it finally is. In it’s primarily unedited, attenuated form.

N’Sync told us “Bye, bye, bye” as we played in the river and I told them yes please, do leave. Which they kindly did a few years later. It was somewhat of a tradition of ours to loudly listen to Brick House by the Commodores when arriving at our of our All-Star games. That song has been buried in my mind in connection to a lot of lost friends and great baseball games. It’s a bit of a bittersweet memory. As I lost my ability to play baseball I also lost many of my friends because baseball was out only connection, but I stil remember all of our great games together. Even though it came out after we moved, Blurry by Puddle of Mudd became a sort of theme song for my childhood and pops up more often then any other song. It isn’t a song I listened to often or even liked very much but it seems to fit with my hazy memories.

I have a notoriously bad memory so most of what I remember, I believe, is due to music and my ability to absorb sounds and never forget a song. You see, my memories without music start only a few years ago, probably five, due to a lovely little concussion. The one thing that survived my mind’s reboot was music and the specific memories attached to those songs. My strongest connection to my home and my childhood is music. Much of it is horrible music from the 90′s which are made infinitely better by the context of the events at the time. For example, I clearly remember climbing the tree in our backyard and while I picture that in my mind The Offspring explain to me their perfect day via One Fine Day. The tree was immense, in proportion, and we would spend hours in it devising plans for our epic tree fort which sadly never came to fruition. It seemed I spent more time above ground then on ground thanks to that tree and the red trampoline we eventually sold to a friend.

Not everything I remember was as large and obvious though. I remember our cobblestone driveway and how I would wonder why no one else in the neighborhood had cobblestone. I remember the house had an inconspicuous green door but after we left those bastards who moved in afterwords painted it red and paved over the driveway. They painted our door as if it were theirs as if it meant nothing to me. Of course I never got to know them, I never even spoke to them. Why would I want to when they are the sort of people who would willingly and probably excitedly, pay money to tear me from my childhood home. The gall they had to buy our house, my home, and change it to their liking always made me angry.

Our house was large by most standards but I couldn’t recognize that when I was young. I was born in that house and my friends had houses of about the same time, everything about it seemed normal to me. Now that I have been torn from my home and thrust into a small apartment I can see what I had before. There were rooms we never used and we even had a room with the obnoxiousness to call itself a bonus room, as if we didn’t have enough space. Looking back I can see that we were pretty well off, but that isn’t what made my house special. It was a place I could run off to if anything was wrong, where I could bring my friends and be certain we would have a good time, and it was where I could be assured I would be safe and be able to sleep through the night.

I’ve changed so much since I lived in that house that I use the few memories I have as a way to learn from myself. When I lived there I was active in three sports, I had more friends then I knew what to do with, and I was a generally happy kid. Now I no longer have the ability to play two of those sports and I have no desire to play the third, I have four friends and rarely talk to anyone else, and I was diagnosed with depression a couple of years ago, whatever that means. The only thing that has stuck with my through the years is music which has always acted as my conduit to anything outside of my comfort zone. I start conversations through music and avoid them the same way. It helps me remember who I was and in many ways shapes the way I will be in the future. My connection to music began when I was a child in my home and music hasn’t been turned off since.

Your input is, of course, welcomed excitedly.

attle.

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