This is a reminiscence, one that from childhood on affected my outlook on life. I am not unique in this regard, nor prescient, but merely aware of that fact that two memories of childhood are still with me in my advanced age. Others have similar experiences. Please feel free to recount them here.
- Communion at a young age. I received my First Catholic Communion at age 6, as a first grader. It was a big deal in my young life, and I was completely devoted to being Catholic, believing everything I was taught by my parents, priests and nuns. Some time, maybe Christmas of 1956 or 1957, I was observing the requirement that I not eat anything for three hours prior to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, but was experiencing stomach cramps and was in pain the entire evening. No matter, I thought, because on receiving communion that night, Jesus would take care of all of that and I would feel good again. It did not work. I still ached all the way home that night. Food, not Jesus, was my salvation.
- Journey to the Center of the Earth, the movie from 1959, based on the Jules Verne book. I was allowed to see this movie with my brother, and enjoyed it very much. The actors involved entered what was a portal leading to underground caves, and, of course, encountered dangers aplenty, including serpent-like monsters. I was 9 years old, and ate it all up. The explorers carried lanterns with them, but were hopelessly lost in the caves and knew at a certain point they would no longer have light. At that point, they would be doomed. The lanterns went out, and darkness set in, except: The walls of the cave had phosphors within them, and they were bathed in natural light. They found their way out and survived.
Somehow, in my young life, though I did not know the word, I realized that the lanterns and loss of light was a metaphor that could be applied to much of life. These days I use it to suggest to people that they turn off their TVs and avoid watching news. Doing so will be an enlightening experience, and the light supplied by “news” and entertainment will shrink compared that that supplied by our own brains, doing our own reasoning, allowing our own conclusions about what is suggested to us as reality.
Share your own childhood impressions here if you’re so inclined. There’s a reason why you visit this blog, and probably has to do with shared similar experiences.
Piece of Mindful 
Good choice of topics. I will give a childhood memory, and an ability I have that is pretty rare in Americans.
I grew up in a forested rural area of New Hampshire, and would take long walks in the woods, along with bicycle rides everywhere, by myself from a very young age. I was naturally an explorer, would lay out maps of town, and later county, and look for interesting places to explore, mostly woods and any undeveloped area.
I eventually learned to walk in near darkness in the woods. And later I could run in the woods, no flashlights or headlights. Later when I moved to Boston as an adult i would run at night on the trails and roads in the park – and very often scare the hell out of people because i could move so silently and quickly even it pitch dark nights, and come up on people who were walking or sitting. What is also remarkable is I never, or very seldom fell or stumbled, and never got hurt doing this. I have very good balance and learned to use my feet as eyes, and keep my body supple to react to sudden drops or rocks and obstructions.
So the metaphor of using and trusting your God given abilities to navigate in life is my lesson.
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Reminds me of a similar skill … I could run down a mountain at full speed. Not on a trail, but rocks and bushes and trees, always believing that the next rock to land on would be there. Once near a mine on a mountainside in Montana we saw a young man do the same thing, full speed down, hitting every rock, no chance of falling. Memories flashed.
I tried that again in my early fifties at a high mountain lake. With a group, fortunately two of them nurses, so after landing on my knee, needing stitches, I got bandaged up. May you be forever young.
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Amazing.
I was a bit of a daredevil. When I was 12 at a Christian retreat at Luther Dale in Wisconsin my father said he would give me a quarter if I could, while wearing my hockey skates, go down the 80′ toboggan ramp. The catch was, I had to be standing no matter what. The freedom and fear had me hooked. Got my quarter and ran right back up to do it again. The rush, you know the one, is heavenly. The problem was I could never go fast or high enough. One day, when I was 24, it caught up with me. But that’s another story.
I enjoy y’all’s writing. They’ve helped my growth along with my nostalgia.
Thank y’all.
Respectfully: Pete from Texas
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Your comments at this point should not be placed in moderation. Cannot control WordPress, however.
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I don’t care. As long as it reached you, I’m good.
Later man.
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Thats pretty cool. We used to do similar things in our high school cross country running summer camps in the White Mountains of NH. And the trails in NH can be pure hard granite, real knee hobblers. I was a really fast descender in my peak hiking days, I wasn’t much of a daredevil though so I never got hurt.
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Mark, I was going to respond to your comment about you not believing in organised paedophilia. Believe me, it exists. I lived in a city where it is hopelessly entrenched at the very highest levels and have personal experience of this.
However, this may open your eyes a little.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jillionaire/p/so-many-paedophiles-in-such-a-small?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1egdf9
I circulate this because it needs to be put a stop to. The city involved has always been known as “the city of churches” which has provided a secure cover for the wholly unacceptable practices which have taken place in that hell hole since the city was founded.
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First, the post under which I placed those thoughts will return in form, and I will restate them. There is a presumption that when we have a sample of something that we have a true broad sample, and that we can apply it to all of humankind. I took that post and comments down because an ugliness erupted, and pure hatred emerged from the depths of normal people confronting an event that by design traumatizes them.
There are families in which perverse behavior exists and might be tolerated. The fact that, in the case you mention, authorities chose not to act might lead in two directions, one that authorities are turning a blind eye, or another that there is not enough evidence to act. I have known a couple of families where by appearances there is something of a mental affliction afoot. In the case of one, it can be reduced to a traumatized parent paying forward with alcoholism and abuse, and in the other alcohol, money and time on their hands. In either case it resulted only in deep, crushing self loathing and unhappiness, and in the case of the moneyed group, suicides either in fact or by extreme self indulgence.
I maintain that pedophiles (having an eight-year-old daughter who was raped by one qualifies me for an opinion of sorts) exist and are dangerous, but do not recruit. Doing so would place them at extreme personal risk of exposure and imprisonment. I do not know the extent of the existence of such people, but think them confined, in the case of our perpetrator, to a trailer in a small outpost in a sparsely occupied area, where he will die (or has died) in misery.
The Catholic scandal? Somewhere in my thousands of posts I wrote about that, not that I am an authority by any means, but will find that post and complete the thought. It involved going through a long list of abuses and classifying them as either paedophilia or abuse of pubescent children, each unpardonable, but the latter not a pedophile ring, nor was any recruitment going on. It was circumstances brought about by a perverse system of training men to be priests, most of them homosexuals.
More later, thanks for your input, which I do not take lightly. There’s always the possibility I am wrong about things.
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John Helmer, who I think is a military and foreign affairs analyst mainly, and sometimes linked on NakedCapitalism – so kind of an alternative voice to the mainstream NYT take on what’s going on in Ukraine etc – gave an interesting, near fakeology take on how the Trump presidency works.. how Trump is “running the show, not the operations.” I doubt Helmer quite has it nailed, but has some details that might have a bit of truth to them –
https://johnhelmer.net/trump-the-retroactive-how-the-ante-is-upped-before-trump-announces-his-decisions/
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