from Friday, April 15, 2005
When I was little we lived in Japan, at Chitose AFB, on the island of Hokkaido. We lived in one half of a quonset hut, a prefabricated dwelling of corrugated iron having a semicircular cross section. It was next door to the Motor Pool, so it took a while to learn to sleep with the sounds of trucks and whatnot going by all night.
Beside the Motor Pool was a patch of strawberries on the edge of some woods. Whenever I hear about Manna from Heaven, I'm sure it is really wild strawberries, all you want, for free.
If you walked through the woods, you would come to a concrete canal on the edge of our school yard. I was little, between 4 and 6 years old, so the canal may really have just been a drainage ditch. In our school yard were underground bomb shelters, where we would be taken if there was an air raid drill. Sorry, no real air raids to spice up this story. In the woods was a water tower that I was afraid of, it just looked like it could walk around and do a Godzilla thing, if it wanted. Luckily, it stayed put.
The first movies I remember seeing were in the Base theater. We had "Mickey Mouse" money on base. No coins, just paper 5 & 10 cent bills. I think it was 10 cents to get into the movie. We, my older brother by 2 1/2 years (who's birthday happens to be 9-11) and my little sister, a bit more than one year younger than me, would walk across a dumping ground for klinkers, some still hot, to get to the movie.
We didn't have television in Japan, but I remembered Gene Autry, the Little Rascals, Betty Boop, Howdy Doody, etc. from before we went. Howdy Doody gave me the creeps! I still have puppet phobia. I remember asking my brother if the people in the TV could see us, because they kept talking to us like they could see us, he said No. Thank God! But I wanted to be Betty Boop, or at least dress like her. And I wanted a horse like all the cowboys.
The fakey fifties dinosaur movies scared the hell out of me. My big brother assured me that they were not behind the curtain; but I just knew, that they knew where I lived and I was just the tasty snack they were looking for. I was always sure I would see a drooling snout pressed up against the windows of our hut. They gave me nightmares. When I compare those hokey special effects of the fifties with today's amazingly real ones, my heart goes out to all the little children of today, looking for drooling snouts at the windows. What got me through it? This sage statement, "Trust me, you're not that important."
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