The CP Chronicles: Chapter Five (Michael)

You could hear his room before you saw it.

The faint static hiss of a VHS tape that had been rewound a thousand times, then the cheerful bubble-and-accordion chaos of The Lawrence Welk Show rolling through the hallway. It was always the same episodes. The same intro music. The same dancers in pastel dresses. And it never stopped.

He was probably close to fifty, whip-smart, and always in matching button-up pajama sets with the pants to match. In all the time I worked there, I never once saw him in “real” clothes. His conversations were punctuated by a stutter and frequent spits into tissues or the trash can. He wasn’t rude. It was just part of him, like the pajamas or the VHS tape.

For a long time, I didn’t think much about the spitting. Plenty of residents had compulsions or habits that made sense only to them. Then one day, I came across the note in his chart. It stopped me cold. Someone had violated him in the worst possible way years earlier, and the spitting wasn’t a tic at all — it was armor. It was his way of saying, never again.

I never told him I knew. He never spoke of it. But every time I walked past that room and heard Lawrence Welk playing, I thought about the way we see people — and how much we miss when we only look at what’s on the surface. Sometimes, the strangest habits aren’t strange at all. They’re survival.

Childhood Memories: Rocks Edition

My memory to share today involves rocks and imaginative play.  My kids were playing store the other day and it made me remember something that I've remembered from time to time over the years.  I'm pretty sure my brother would be the only one to verify the factualness of these events.

I remember when I was young my brother and I would play store with rocks outside.  We would take crayons out and find big rocks and write what type of merchandise they were.  For instance, one might say microwave, one might say radio, etc.  Then we would use smaller rocks as money (not sure if we wrote amounts on them or not.)  We would take turns using our "money" and deciding what we wanted to buy.

It sounds incredibly dorky, but we lived out in the country and weren't inundated with useless toys, so we kind of had to make our own fun where we could.  Much different than these days when you can buy play money at the dollar tree.  When my kids were playing store, I was going to tell them they could use rocks as money and one of them held up these big fake play coins they had and said, "but we have money to play with."  Ah, yes... hard times our kids live in.

Childhood Memories

Oftentimes I find myself thinking back about things I remember from when I was young.  The funny thing is that nine times out of ten if I run the memories by my parents or siblings, they don't think it happened or that it was a figment of my imagination.  But if that were the case, why would we remember them so vividly, especially if they were just mundane experiences?

Well, here's my theory.  Each of us is impacted differently by our experiences in life.  Perhaps something that I held onto was more important to me than one of my siblings who doesn't remember the event happening.  Likewise, my parents have four kids worth of memories plus all the years of memories that they didn't have children.  So, it would make perfect sense that they wouldn't remember every little detail and event that their children do.

I'm not a big fan of being wrong, and these are memories that I've had for YEARS, not just some random thing that popped into my head and I was like, "oh, yeah, I think I remember something like that happening."  No, these feel like genuine memories.  So, in that line of thinking, I've decided to start sharing some of these memories with my readers.  But, my point in all this is that they may or may not be disputed by the other parties involved.  Of course I think they are valid, but chances are, I'm the only one.  They will hereto be referred to as "Childhood Memories: ***** Edition."

Happy Monday!!!