I’ve got two, one, is we love katamari, which I’m currently playing the rerelease of on steam. The Japanese culture, the wonderfully wacky story and gameplay, the weird but enrapturing soundtrack all coalesced into something new and amazing for me that to this day 20 years later I’m still glued to the screen for.
The other one is back when I was little enough, I would lie on my back under the Christmas tree looking out the window at the blizzard outside. I would lie like this for hours just watching the flurry of snow hitting the pane glass, that icy chaos mere inches away from the calm, twinkling tranquility of the string lights on the trees.
Both of these memories make me incredibly happy and frustratingly sad in a bittersweet way, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. How about you guys, what childhood memories stuck with you to this day? What felt so special about that moment?
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.
Hey well I’m glad you found a little niche you were able to truely enjoy, I can’t imagine having a childhood where you don’t even have a single one
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.
I was born in the 90s so obviously I don’t have the same experience, but when I was little my parents would, once or twice a month take me to borders and let me choose any comic book I wanted, I always got two spiderman comics and maybe an x-men or Archie comic and would read them obsessively until the next visit. But I loved the busy, yet quiet atmosphere and the smell of the coffee they made at the little shop within the store, I was super sad when borders closed for good
Right there with you on the comic books, though I was born in '80. Saving my money ($1.25) to go buy the new release at the corner store was always such a thrill. I still have most of them and have added to the collection over the decades.
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.
The ant orgy moved locations
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.
I like the okage one, it reminds me of oldschool runescape music
That entire game is fucking nuts. Pretty sure all of the dev crew was riding an LSD high through the entirety of its creation.
Autumn Voyage goes hard
Flipping over big rocks to check out the life underneath!
Pokemon, some music that we used to listen to in those days, harry potter. Lord of the rings too ig.
I loved harry potter for that, up until I think the 5th movie where its not really set in the school anymore and didn’t have that wonder to it, it was more serious, I think the school did a lot for the whimsical aspect of the series
A foggy quiet morning. It reminds me of how my mom would walk me to kindergarten.
Ooh I loved the fog, especially when you’re on the way to school, or a thick snow, it makes it feel like you’re in a different world
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.
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.
