Hi guys

I am fading fast but just like a good EA I prepared! 

I wrote up a few blog posts ahead of time and some of these contain my random childhood memories.  I want to leave them behind for my loved ones but hopefully you find some of them amusing enough to read yourself.  Enjoy

I was born in 1967 and I am so grateful for that fact.  I have such fond memories of my childhood which would have been spent entirely outdoors if it had been allowed.  Sadly, I got the indoor kind of parents!  I grew up without mobile phones or needing to be picked up from school.  There were of course bad people out there and we were warned about these mythical beings but for the most part they were just scary stories that happened in other children’s worlds and not in mine.

The world was such a safe place that I used to get on a bus each day to take me to kindergarten which means that I did this when I was four years old!  My parents didn’t own a car and it was the only way for me to get there and I was not alone in this practice. I suspect that nowadays you would be arrested for this common every day practice of years gone by.

One of my very first vivid memories was of accidently catching the wrong bus and being horrified when it veered off the normal course to streets unknown. 

I was instantly aware that this state of affairs was completely out of my hands, I was too young and knew too little to fix it.  I think I must have started crying and two lovely nuns in actual real-life habits rescued me. They took me to their place of work and phoned my Mum and I was then deposited back to my rightful place in the world.  I was very glad to be back where I belonged.

The terror of not knowing where I was is something that happens to all children a number of times in their lives but the take home for me as a child and why I remember it as a “ah huh” moment is this.  I suddenly realized that I wasn’t completely in control of my world.  I look back and realize what a lovely childhood I must have had up to that point to think that I was in charge of all I surveyed until I stepped onto the wrong bus that day.

It’s a first memory because I would have been very distressed.  Later in life I learned that the stressful, painful and horrific events leave an indelible mark on the brain.  These memories are stored in our brain’s version of a ‘vault’ in a different part of the brain from normal memory storage so that they will never be forgotten. 

I would so much rather remember with perfect clarity my happiest days but alas this section of the brain is reserved only for traumatic or life-threatening events. 

I take issue with this and it’s on my long list of questions for God when I meet Him.