Childhood Archives - The Pure Life of Dreams

August 15, 2024August 15, 2024

Brutal Editor Provides Review in Chinese Restaurant

I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant located at the end of the main street of the village. It was late at night and the rain beat down hard outside.

I sat in the corner, furthest from the door.

The restaurant had plain green wallpapered walls that had not been changed in decades. Two large paper menus side by side were tacked up next to the entrance and they still reflected the older prices.

Two other men were there as well, though the restaurant was closing up for the night. They sat at separate tables closer to the large window in the front and they appeared to be listening in on my conversation. They both had their anoraks on, whilst they sat huddled over their meals.

I was on a call on my flip phone and it was one of the editors. He’d gone through the sample I’d given him and I had my leather bound notebook open on the table in front of me. I was taking notes while he talked.

The editor had ripped apart my story. It had been upsetting but I was willing to take his points on board. He didn’t talk loudly but his voice came out through the phone and projected through the restaurant because it was quiet in there.

I was sure the others could hear even though I didn’t want them to.

Behind me on a shelf in the wall was an old time radio with faded white plastic casing. Someone had pulled up its antenna. It felt as if the editor’s voice was projecting through the radio even though I held the phone close up to my hear to muffle the sound from the other restaurant goers.

The owner came out from some swing doors to my right.

“We’re closing,” he barked and this time we made as if to leave. It was the second time he’d come out to tell us.

I stepped out into the rainy night and held the notebook above my head with one hand while holding the phone up to my ear with the other.

“Look, I’ll have to call you back again. The rain is beating down,” I said to the editor as I followed the curve of the road away from the restaurant and past the closed up stores.

The yellow light of the storefronts projected dimly onto the sidewalk as I walked by. And the rain flecked in my eyes as I snapped the phone shut.

Photo of restaurant from my childhood referenced in Seeking Sanook.

May 23, 2024May 24, 2024

A Unique Storage Unit

It’s Christmas Day and we are all together Mum, Elaine, Me and Dad in the Coring Road house, in the living room with its opulent fake gold embossed wallpaper.

It’s already the afternoon and Elaine and I are bored enough to look through some old stuff that had been put away in storage.

The sun is coming in from the French doors and Mum and Dad are talking while I am pulling things out of old cardboard boxes. I look at each item before handing it to Elaine to look at too.

The room is reversed. The couch, where mum and dad are sitting, is on the other side from the radiator where Elaine and I are looking at the boxes. From one box I’m pulling out her old soft toys, one after another.

The next soft toy I pull out is the purple teddy that replaced Big Ted after Big Ted got burnt in the fire.

“He doesn’t look like Big Ted,” I tell her as I push the teddy bear in Elaine’s face.

It’s purple and triangular, the wide base at its bottom is white. I guess it wasn’t supposed to be an exact replica.

And then I notice Uncle Vartan has shown up. I go over to him and give him a big hug. He feels warm and full in my embrace.

“You’ll have to take the baby for a walk,” Elaine says. Uncle Vartan has brought with him a baby that sits in a pram at the end of the couch.

“I don’t want to take the baby,” I tell her. Then again it wouldn’t be terrible if I took the baby for a walk, out in the fresh air.

We are bored and need to get out of the house.

I clamber up onto the truck behind me, to see what other boxes I can find. It’s a huge army pickup with a metal frame which I use to lever myself onto the back of the flatbed. Then I turn to Dad.

“Why don’t you put all your stuff in a storage unit rather than in this old pickup truck?”

He looks up at me.

“It’s slow,” he answers.

“What! Slower than a storage unit?”

I laughed at the absurdity of it, full belly laughs. And I couldn’t stop laughing, in fact my belly was rippling with laughter until I awoke…

“You alright?” says Siobhan as I stir to.

“Yeah,” I reply.

“I thought you were having a seizure,” she says.

“No,” I reply, “But I have to write this dream down,” still laughing.

Photo from PxHere.

April 27, 2024June 7, 2024

Ana Wintour is my Half-Sister

Ana Wintour who lives in Trotto, Napoli is my half-sister. There is a picture with me and my sister in her apartment and I recognize it because Elaine is wearing her sick dress.

Dad is there too, lying on a couch.

And my mum is in there as well, in a separate old-time black and white photo (the small square postage stamp size ones with crinkled borders) and she does not look quite the same, but still it could be her.

I have to crane my neck as I stand on a chair in Ana’s daughter’s house, looking at the framed photo collage placed high up on the wall above the cupboard door. The wooden chair is rickety but close up in the little black and white photo is my mother, I’m almost convinced. She’s looking square on, and in the photo she has straighter hair than usual, and it is short and parted at the side.

It is the color photo from the 70s that really gives it away though.

My dad is lying on the couch in our living room in Coring Road and he’s holding Elaine as a baby up above him; me, I’m in my green shorts, in the background. And next to that photo is the sick dress photo. The dress was so called because it was a woolen, knee length dress with yellow, blue and red hooped stripes top to bottom.

Elaine had a matching woolen hat, I remember, with a matching multicolored pom-pom. My mother loved that dress. Us, not so much.

Once I saw the dad photo I cried out, “That’s us! that’s us!” as if it was proof.

I got down from the chair and Ana’s daughter came in with two others (was one of them Ana? I didn’t think so), and they sat on stiff backed wooden chairs facing us. Ana’s daughter had thick set black eyebrows, long straight dark hair parted in the middle, and she had a long face.

Anyway, judging by the age of Ana’s daughter I figured at Ana must have been my half-sister, even though she’d have to have been born a couple of years ahead of me.

That’s when I asked Ana’s daughter where they were from and she replied “Trotto… Napoli.” Only I couldn’t quite hear the second word. I had her repeat it, she had a thick rolling Italian accent after all, and at first I heard “Trappoli,” but I hadn’t of heard such a place so I settled on Napoli instead.

The dream was clear about the spelling, Ana Wintour not the other one, but why was this so important to me?
Photo from Thought Catalog via Flickr, credit Quote Catalog.

June 29, 2023March 20, 2024

Campsite Reconciliation with the Cold Cousin

Mao Sr. aka Dad and I were camping by the river, a grassy area out in the open. Our tents were already pitched, plain white Boy Scout V shaped tents, one for us and another for a friend of his.

Geri, a cousin, was there too; she showed up unexpectedly, and I thought to bring up some of the past grievances that kept our two families apart. She came by bike and she stood propped against it using the angle of the bike to lean back. And she was wearing a white chemise with plain dark trousers, and talking random stuff.

I too was sitting on my bike, only I was backwards on the seat.

Then I asked over to Dad.

“Might as well,” he replied.

And I told her. “When you came over to Coring Road all those years ago, one of you, I can’t remember who, said, ‘Is there a TV in this joint?’ as you walked in.”

I paused and thought about telling her about the cucumber sandwiches, how lousy the cousins thought them, and also the card game. Instead, I looked past Geri towards Dad again, but he was unpacking large bales of tobacco by the river. I wanted to tell her that Dad was playing cards with her, she was all of twelve or thirteen, and she was F’ing and blinding as she kept losing with each hand.

Then I thought not.

Geri needed to get some cigarettes from in town and we started walking, or rather she walked while pushing me on my bike, with me still backwards on the seat, and I thought we would veer off and I would fall but she held the back wheel and the handlebars and kept pushing firmly.

I was conscious of her white shirt close up, her breasts ample beneath. I wanted her to stop but then suddenly Geri stood back and pulled out a cigarette, ready to light it.

Dad was still behind her, him and his friend shaking the leaves from their clear plastic wrap. The leaves fell, wrinkled and brown, large and loose, from the wrapping into the water. And I thought I would be cool, because I too smoked the occasional cigarette, that I’d do the same.

I looked in my bicycle pouch and there was only one cigarette left, it was one of the long ones, the 100’s, and it was slightly bent and cracked. I took it out and held it to my lips then I leant towards Geri to light hers first, but hers was even more cracked than mine, and the paper barely held in the tobacco, I could see the brown of it poking through the slits.

And I could not see how to light it without the thing falling apart.

Cucumber image by Kai Reschke from Pixabay
Bikes by Barry MacHale via Flickr

May 18, 2023May 18, 2023

Hiking the Spanish Trail

We are staying at one of Lizzie’s friend’s houses in Turkey, a person who identifies as they/them. And once we are settled in, I think to wander around. The others want to hang so I go off by myself, climb the rocks round back of the house. And at first it is quite straight forward, a path clearly laid out through a pink translucent landscape, going up into the hills.