Where were you in '82? (reposted from alt.poly)

[firecat]

In 1982 I was 20-21, in my junior & senior years of college, I had one of the prime time slots at the university radio station; I lived in three different group houses; I pined and obsessed over the boy I loved who only liked me as a friend; I didn't go home for the summer for the first time; I worked on the university's summer paint crew; I endured the worst heat wave of my life; and I stole a lot of milk crates which I still have.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Um, let's see... I graduated in '89, so in '82 I was in... math has never been a strong subject for me... okay, I guess I was in 5th grade, my last year of private school before being exposed to the multi-leveled hell that was (and by most accounts still is) the public school system. I would have been... ten, I think.

I may have kissed at that age, but that's counting "play kisses" with my best friend or the school "loverboy." I wasn't yet experiencing true preteen angst, but I was familiar with depression, even at that tender age. My favorite things to do were climb trees, read, and play intricate make-believe games with my vast collection of tiny animals and scenery on my desktop.

Three square feet of my desk had been co-opted into a miniature city, complete with public statues and fountains, gardens, a "forest" (which migrated depending on where I needed it to be - I had a very limited number of trees, three IIRC), and furnishings for each house. These weren't dollhouse furniture, though; one "bed" was a hinged ring case, another was a tiny coil pot lined with cotton. I made most of the settings myself, or assembled them from diverse sources, and spent literally hours making up strange and intricate dramas between them. I ardently wish that I'd written some of that stuff down, or that somebody had recorded me as I played.

One of the most traumatic events of my later life was when I sold off the remainder of my collection of miniature animals, at a time when I was in dire need of cash. I cried when I walked away from the store. There were twenty or thirty of them, cats, pigs, horses, camels, and many others that I can't remember now.

Today, I can look back at the toys and the games I played without tears. I still miss them, but... I have other games now, other toys. It's not the same, but it never could be anyway, even if I had the old collection back. I don't truly feel that I've lost anything. I've learned, I've changed, and nothing that I can remmber is ever truly gone.

And it makes me smile to think that somebody bought those little figures, and put them in zir collection, or gave them to zir children, who then made up more elaborate stories for them to enact.