31 Days, 31 Memories - Day 20

[bironic]

Comforting dreams of Robert Sean Leonard, vampire movies that end with everyone dying in a sudden explosion, documentaries on jellyfish whose stings turn female scientists into porn stars (long story): Life chugs along.

20. Pre-School

My father used to teach computers at a community college and brought me to work with him once. I remember several things from that day: a set of printers along one wall of a huge, well-lit off-white room -- one for magenta, one for yellow, one for cyan, one for black; going to lunch at some fast-food place with him and some of his co-workers; afterwards, playing with the early Macintosh computer patterns in a graphics program that looked like bricks turned diagonally, and clip art like a fat full frog and a hamburger and french fries; and learning from him how to twiddle my thumbs.

Comments

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

I remember the afternoons I used to spend in my father's office, between leaving school and my mother's coming home from work. The place had a high, fluroscent-lit ceiling, and bookshelves that even now I still picture stretching up and up forever. The bookshelves puzzled me when I was younger. I was madly in love with books, not just with the stories but with the words, the weight of them in my hands, the feel and smell of pages, but there was absolutely nothing on those endless shelves that I wanted to read (not really being at an age to appreciate things with titles like "The Use of Aquatic Imagery in the Age of Sophocles"). I couldn't understand how so many books could exist in one place without any of them being novels! But there were things that delighted me: the water fountain with its oily, dusty taste, like the air in my father's office and in the library where I would later work when I graduated university; a little leaping fish carved out of green stone and mounted on a paperweight; and a chalk board with four different colours of chalk, which was a wonderfully tabooed pleasure because chalkboards in my world belonged only to teachers and weren't for me to play with.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

And it was all so wondrous... Whereas now, to go back, we would probably only see harsh lighting and decrepit objects in a room that seems smaller and has seen better days.

[maddy-harrigan.livejournal.com]

"'And what good is a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"

I remember going to my mum's office after school, which was also my church. I'd sit in the grungy olive-green-and-white church office and draw pictures of dragons or try to invent useful things out of paper and scotch tape and paper clips. Occasionally, I would go into the sanctuary and walk on the communion rail and pretend it was a balance beam at the Olympics. Once, my friend S. and I - her mother was a seminarian at the church for a year - went into the Sunday School rooms and washed the tables with apple juice because it dried shinier than water. When I was ten, my friend L. and I - her mother was on the Finance Committee - discovered a door in the back of the gigantic church organ, and climbed inside. There were ladders and walkways, and you could see through the pipes into the balcony and the enormous dark Victorian sanctuary below.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

A whole wonderland in a familiar place.