Thursday 4 October 2012

memoir writers homework-hand me downs.

I've heard it said that the position of birth within your family has an effect on how your life turns out to be.It was quite an elaborate theory,and,for the most part I don't know if I ever believed in it.Well,I believed in it enough,and for long enough to provide an explanation of it that gained me nearly perfect marks in whatever college class that was teaching such poppycock at the time.

One of the realities of my birth order was that I was more or less at the top of the food chain,being the oldest,and the only male in a family that otherwise had only girls.That meant that hand me downs did not really figure prominently in my life.Most of my clothing was new,so far as I could tell.Moreover,being a boy,I could be rather rough on clothing,so usually my old things didn't get passed down to my younger siblings either.My pants usually ended up kneeless from hours of sliding across the sidewalk,pushing a toy dump truck,or cement mixer.My mother would never really have considered dressing my sister in boys clothing anyway.And by the time my youngest sister would have been able to make use of them,they would have been nothing more than a pile of moth dung anyway,since we were nearly ten years apart in age.

My first bicycle was handed down from someone.I'm just not sure who,so that makes it more of a used bike than a hand me down.When I was too big for it,it was passed down to my sister,who may or may not have felt the same way about such things as I did.There was no stigma in my mind attached to using something that had once belonged to some unknown person.But I'm not sure I would have felt the same way if I'd been at the bottom of the family food chain and had to watch a lot of siblings use something before I did.Maybe I would have had a sense of nothing really being mine.

Down the road,not far away was a family that was very poor.They lived in an old,falling down house surrounded by a mixture of mud and hay,but no real grass.Some of the windows in their house were not glass,but clear,thick plastic.And,there were a lot of children,and seemingly not so many clothes to go around.If you were to see one of the older boys  in a red t-shirt one summer,you were likely to see that same shirt on a younger sibling the next summer.It would be a bit more worn and not quite as clean.The younger children often appeared to be very dirty as old clothing made it's way down through their family.

Some people don't like to buy clothing at places like Value Village.It's likely baggage that they have been carrying around for a lifetime,or,at least that's what most of those people I know tell me.I don't mind,because  that baggage was never an issue with me.That turns out to be a good thing since I've worked in a lot of places where you could easily ruin a shirt in a single shift.So much better to buy a shirt for a couple of dollars when that is part of your daily reality.There are some things in my childhood that have ended up serving me very well later in life.

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