My mother says that when I was between one and two years old, she put me in the stroller to walk to the store. Apparently this was not unusual. It was a fairly long walk. We hadn't gone far and I told her that we should probably turn around because it was going to rain. She looked up at the sky and I was right; it did look like rain. She was stunned. I knew it was going to rain before she did. She turned around. No, this doesn't mean I was destined to be weatherperson and missed my calling. Actually, I am not sure what it means. I guess I was just observant as a child.
At about the same age, we were riding in the car after a bad thunderstorm, and there were a lot of downed tree limbs everywhere. She says I got very upset when she was about run over one of them in the road. I started crying and carrying on and made her stop the car. What was the matter? "Don't run over it. You'll hurt it." Yep, that's me. Apparently, there was a conversation that day about how the tree was already dead blah blah blah. If you've been reading my blogs and thinking, "This girl feels like she needs to band-aid the whole world, and she is setting herself up for crushing disappointment." Well, the whole thing started with this tree in the road when I was one and half.
When I was three, or so, my parents bought me this cute, plastic, yellow car that I could sit in and pedal around. We had moved to Florida and had this little patio outside our backdoor. I say patio. It was more like a concrete slab. Whatever. It was large enough that I should have been able to ride my little car in a circle around the slab. I say should. I would ride from one end of the slab to the other. My mother is saying,"Turn the wheel and pedal." Nope. That was just not happening. I dead-ended at the end of the slab. I stood up, picked up the car, because it wasn't heavy, did a 180 with it, put it back down, and pedaled to the other end of the slab, where I repeated the performance. Unfortunately, there is photo documentation of that somewhere. I am not sure what this says about me. Driving wasn't going to be easy, particularly a stick shift, is one possibility. Another was that life was going to offer up a lot of dead ends that needed creative solutions. It is a good thing that I am in the creative solution business.
So what childhood stories do you want to share? And what do you think that they say about you?
