stoopbeck

Danny: What would you do if I stole your sandwich?

Alex: I'd cut you up and eat you instead.

Mom: You've been having some real cannibalistic tendencies.

Alex: I'll try and dial it down a notch. Now. Do we have a cutting board for meat?

Mom and Danny: ...

(questions stolen from

dyoselin)

1. What were some of the smells and tastes of your childhood?
Tastes: My dad's homemade drop biscuits, coconut-flavored snow balls, crawfish with cocktail sauce, homemade hot chocolate. Smells: tea olive, lantana, dog, gingerbread in the oven, my grandmother's cigarettes.

2. What did you have as a child that you do not think children today have?
Parents who refused to buy me coloring books or video games because they thought they would stunt my creativity. Also, dead geckos in my desk in my classroom. Not many kids today have those.

3. What elementary grade was your favorite?
First or second, probably. First I had Mr. Reynaud, and he fostered a love of writing and encouraged my reading and drawing. Second was Ms. Zent, who was the last sane teacher I had for a long time, and who loved to read us stories involving the Kentucky Derby, since she was from Kentucky.

4. What summer do you remember the best as a child?
The summer of third grade, when I spent every weekend with Julie, planning elaborate games and doing the death scene from Romeo and Juliet off my front porch, and that day we spent five hours trying to gather enough honeysuckle nectar to sell people glasses, and only ended up with about a centimeter of liquid.

5. What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self, and at what age?
I would tell ten-year-old me that moving isn't necessarily the world ending, that ten-year-old me will have awesome experiences and meet great people and come to love the place she is moving to, no matter how insane and uptight and colorless it may seem at first. And not to get that haircut because dude, what was ten-year-old me thinking?!

It's weird, pulling up memories from my childhood. Trying to think of summers past, it's like A Child's Christmas in Wales:

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

God, that Dylan Thomas was a freakin' genius.