Recollections ... early memories

recollections of early childhood memories ...

Recollections

I don’t know if you have ever done this, but I imagine that many of you have.  Take some time out from our endlessly busy days to attempt to recall your earliest memory.  Now, I have early memories that are bits and pieces, with no real continuity, rhyme nor reason to them.  So, I suppose, my earliest, somewhat coherent and substantially ‘vivid’ memory would be my excursion down U.S. 51.  Yes, U.S. 51 is an interstate highway.  U.S. 51 ran from New Orleans to Wisconsin.  My father had a Standard Oil gas station just across the border in Illinois, about a mile from the house we lived in.  I was living in Beloit Wisconsin at the time, I was between 2 and 3 years of age.  On this given night, a Saturday, my mother and father employed a young lady to ‘babysit’ me, while they went out for the evening to listen to music and dance.  Apparently I had been put to bed, unaware that I had a babysitter.  Sometime between 2 am and 3 am I awoke and upon discovery that my mother and father were missing I decided to go hunt for them.  I was terribly upset and as I headed south on U.S. 51, walking the double yellow line in the middle of the road, I remember the lights being distorted from the huge alligator tears that welled in my eyes and would stream down my cheeks while I sought a familiar face.  Suddenly a car stops and it’s Boots and Ed, friends of my mom and dad who owned a Mom and Pop corner grocery story.  They rescued me from the onslaught of random traffic in the dead of the early morning.  Needless to say, my father scolded the baby sitter unmercifully and I never did see her again.  I had been heading down to the gas station in my quest to locate the two most important figures in my life at the time.  From my birth I had basically been raised at the gas station, days there with Dad while Mom cleaned rooms at a small hotel.  Then in the evenings my father had a shop job at Bessley Wells, a manufacturing plant while my Mom ran the gas station.  So, I knew where I was headed, must of thought I had a car … LOL … but perhaps it was an indication, that all my life, I would do things my way in order to enhance the experiences and offerings of life to it’s fullest.  Adventure keeps us alive!