My Favorite Things

When I was a child, growing up in Lawrence, MA, in the early nineties, there were many things that I enjoyed doing. I had lots of interests, hobbies and things that “rocked my boat.”
Growing up, a few of my most beloved pastimes that occupied most of my time were reading; my mother and I would visit the library on a weekly basis and the bookshelves in our house were always PACKED with all kinds of books, making things; we kept a box in our house, one of those huge plastic ones, and it was always filled with colored paper, crayons, glue, scissors and every kind of art supplies you could imagine.
On rainy days, my mother and I would sit down and make all kinds of neat things together. It was a great way to brighten up a gloomy, rain-soaked day. We lived on a dead end street. Riding my little pink bike with the pink and purple streamers on the handlebars waving in the wind from the top of the hill at the very end of the street down to our dirt driveway at the very end was frequent entertainment for me. On warm summer nights, my father and I would ride down to the White Hen Pantry at the end of the street next to us and buy Slush puppies. My favorite was grape.
Another treasured childhood pastime of mine was the frequent weekend outings my father and I would go on. Just about every other weekend we would go to the movies together. There wasn’t a kiddy movie that came out that we didn’t see. (Yes, it was me who wanted to see them. Of course, he only took me!) Although honestly, it was a great time for both of us! Another place that we would frequent often was this neat park in Methuen. I can’t recall the name of it, but the memories of it are as vivid as though I was looking at a photograph. There was a playground, a cool old wooden gazebo in the middle of a huge open field, (gorgeous in the early spring) and a trail down by the water. The park was right next to a river, which is why I, still to this day, will always remember it as “The River.”
I enjoyed doing every one of these things, but my favorite thing to do as a child was listening to music.
When I was real little, one of my favorite things to do was to bring my little cassette recorder outside with me and turn it up blasting while I would go on the swings. We had a swing set in our backyard, and I would rest the tape player usually on either the seesaw or the slide and swing away. No exaggeration, I used to spend hours just pumping away on the swing, trying to push myself up into the air as high as I possibly could, singing along loudly to my tape of sing-along songs.
When I got older and started first and second grade, the days of swinging on the swings and blasting my kid songs eventually ended, but my love of music did not. Introduced to me by my mother, (She couldn’t get enough of them.) I began to really enjoy music from the fifties, sixties and seventies. Only about seven or eight at the time, “oldies” music quickly became my favorite kind of music to listen to. Not soon enough for me, I had an entire shelf of oldies cassettes. I used to spend entire afternoons holed up in my room, listening to my tapes and occasionally flicking through the oldies stations on the radio. Even now, if I hear some of my old favorites on the radio, it brings the biggest smile to my face.
Even though I haven’t found myself entertaining some of these pastimes for over a decade, all the wonderful memories I have of them will never fade. And even some of the things that I still find interesting, like listening to music and riding my bike downtown for an ice cold slush puppy on a hot summer’s day, are no longer the same. I no longer jam to oldies on the radio, and no, I can’t ride my bike down to the corner of Warwick Street to buy my grape slush puppy, but the essence of those pastimes will never change. The enjoyment I get from doing them and the wonderful memories they provoke.
These are just some of the many things that I enjoyed doing as a child.