This sounds kind of sad, but bear with me. This was c. 1976-1980.

My father was mostly absent, but I prefered his neglect to his abuse, so that was okay. He’d go on business trips a lot. My mom was an alcoholic, and sometimes she’d be passed out for days. I grew up an only child in a suburban home, and some weekends a year, I had the house to myself. From age 8-12, I had a few weekends here and there where fortune fell upon me and I’d be alone in the house with no real responsibilities. Friday night home from school to Monday morning going to school, all I had to do was check if my mother was still passed out, and if so, it was like one long vacation from my life to be myself. Bonus if there was still food in the house, which usually there was something I could cook myself.

I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid, except sanctioned PBS shows, but we had a small B&W TV in the kitchen for my mom’s soap operas and cooking shows. I’d drag up all my Legos, pour them on the kitchen table, and watch “illegal TV” all weekend while building stuff with my Legos. Eating when I wanted to, or not, and I had free reign of pretty much anything there.

My positive childhood memories are scant and few, and most are just things like that. Like “sometimes the sun came out, if only for a brief time, before the storms returned.” I have a lot more as an adult.

The simple quiet of a warm summer afternoon. I’m watching one right now on a deck over looking a rocky yard and a small lake nearby.

I grew up poor and never knew it until I grew older. We had enough but never enough for luxuries. In the summer I’d have a breakfast of tea and toast and be gone all day. I would go home for a small lunch and that was all the food I had and I never cared.

On days like today, I would just go roaming around everywhere with my friends. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn we’d just be outside doing nothing and everything all day long.

I’m in my 40s now, my bones ache, I tire easily and my friends are long gone either on their own path or gone from this life.

I miss those days and I miss my friends.

We had a beach cabin that we would go to for two or three weeks during summer. There was no electricity but we had the best time spending time there.

I remember we would go swimming in the sea under the blistering sun, white hot sand that we had to run on as fast as we could to sit on the porch where my dad had assembled “the porch table” that it was nothing more than the wooden kitchen door that doubled as furniture because that is all we had. Then he would place a big majolica bowl filled with an expertly sliced cooled watermelon…oh man I am tearing up here: The sweet flavor of the ripe cool fruit against our parched salty tongues felt like heaven. The smell of sea and fruit and salt and sand.

Beautiful memories. I miss my dad so much.

Print comic books. As a child in the 1970s, they were the best hobby. No video games, so comics and riding bikes around the neighborhood was the most fun to be had. The bittersweet sound of cicadas in the summer towards sunset meant that it was time to go home. That will always be a microcosm of childhood happiness for me.

Being outside in nature. Even landscapes that look “dead” are full of life and history if you slow down and look closely around you.

I grew up wandering my grandparents’ woods as a kid, I associate being out in nature in general with being unobserved and not having to mask, which is just more relaxing.

Flying ant day.

Once a year, on a warm and still summer evening, just on sunset, the sky would fill with hundreds of thousands of winged ants. It was magical.

Then one year we waited for them, but summer turned to autumn and they never came. And like that, the magic had gone forever.

Fresh cut grass before a rain.

Fresh cut cucumbers. When, growing up, I used to fish for Rainbow Smelt. Freshly caught, they smell like freshly cut cucumbers. I always get a flash back when I get that smell.

Thunderstorms at night. If it’s also exactly 60 degrees fareinheight too, oooh

Video game music, especially for the less popular ones like Jetforce Gemini or weird shit like Okage.

Flipping over big rocks to check out the life underneath!

Snow is a great example. As a kid, snow was freedom from school, a sculpting medium, a sledding surface, a new landscape to explore…

As an adult, it mostly means tangled commutes and manual labor.

Granted, a gentle snowstorm can be pretty nice when you don’t have work the next day, but it doesn’t have the same magic it did.

Being up in the middle of the night in the summer of 2003 watching adult swim in my (parent’s) basement as a kid. I had horrible anxiety and trouble getting along with other people for various reasons, and my parents weren’t much help. When I was here watching this, in a room I never usually went in, it was like being in a different world. I felt calm for the first time in forever, and the weird adult swim stuff made it feel even more otherworldly and separated from my normal life. The adult swim bumps and content from that time are so cemented in my mind but looking at it now they’ve changed so much, so many times. I’ll still remember it the way it was.

A foggy quiet morning. It reminds me of how my mom would walk me to kindergarten.

Pokemon, some music that we used to listen to in those days, harry potter. Lord of the rings too ig.