I distinctly remember that Woodstock ended on my 16th birthday, except, as it happens, it didn't. And the turning point year of 1968, which I thought I recalled so clearly, I was in Panama, only 12 years old, and almost certainly blissfully unaware.
So I wrote down a calendar and I'm putting it here to help me remember, or at least distinguish between memories and wishes.
August 17, 1956, my birth
1957 1 year old
1958 2
1959 3
1960 4
1961 5
1962 6 start 1st grade
1963 7 2nd grade
1964 8 3rd
1965 9 4th
1966 10 5th
1967 11 6th
1968 12 7th
1969 13 8th
1970 14 9th
1971 15 10th
1972 16 11th
1973 17 12th
1974 18 started college
School years:
1st 62-63
2nd 63-64
3rd 64-65
4th 65-66
5th 66-67
6th 67-68
7th 68-69
8th 69-70
9th 70-71
10th 71-72
11th 72-73
12th 73-74
So now some of my autobiographical ramblings will fit into the timeline of this particular blink of an eye.
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1 comment:
i have had problems with things like that, too. i remember things happening at a certain age, or in a certain year, when really i'm years off. i try to gauge things by how old anna was, but that doesn't seem to work either. not to mention i remember things from such early childhood that it doesn't make sense that i remember them. like being taken down to the office when i was in preschool because they thought i had chicken pox, or drawing that picture of my house with the shark window. both of those things happened at ages that i really shouldn't be able to remember, and yet i do.
gauging by boyfriends doesn't help, as i remember beau from third grade, and yet i remember mrs. brown's classroom, which is fourth or fifth grade. i remember papa dying when i was with adrian, but that's years behind.
what we seem to remember better is how we felt and what we associated things with. the way i loved my little sister the first second that i saw her, and how you used to hold me up and let me run a wooden spoon through the glass prism hanging in the kitchen, or how my father pulled my beloved cat out from under a playhouse, put her in a basket, and let her die in my house next to me so that i could be with her.
maybe the years that the feelings happened don't matter so much, but more that we remember feeling them so strongly.
i can't wait to read this blog.
<3gen
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