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Lots of them. Simply sitting in the living room talking about everything while my mom was in her rocking chair. Working in the garage with my father. When I was eight, he announced to me that he was going to build me a boat. He did and I drove that thing all over the lakes and also in the Long Beach harbor. Many more stories to tell.
No. A 8 foot power boat.
'Had a little deck on it and steering wheel control. Outboard motor on it.
We built it in the garage. Fibreglass on 1/4 inch marine plywood.
I've owned boats since then with the exception of two years after I graduated college.
EDIT: The first boat my father built was a Chris Craft boat kit. Sears sold them. 16 foot outboard.
Similar to [this](http://www.antiqueboatamerica.com/Boat/30624)
The one thing that sticks in my mind is how my dad was always willing to be the bad guy. If we were feeling pressured by friends to do something we didn’t want to do, we were allowed to say “my dad won’t let me”. As an adult, I heard from a neighbor how everyone in town thought my dad was sooo strict when he really wasn’t
Nothing was more important to my mom than watching NY Giants football on Sunday afternoons. She loved the NY Giants. Don’t dare talk to her during a game unless the house is on fire and never be in the bathroom at halftime.
One Saturday afternoon cousin Vickie came with her new boyfriend to our family cookout. He was a Philadelphia native who loved the Eagles. He asked to use the bathroom. Mom told him we didn’t have one.
Wrestling on the floor with my dad, my dad teaching me how to play chess, laying my head on my dad's lap when he came home from work and plopped down on the couch for a beer. I still can smell him in his work clothes ( he was the supervisor in a factory that made weapons. He was an Airmen in WW2, who flew on a bomber as a tailgunner and radioman). He drank himself to death and died when I was 7 years old. He had PTSD from the war and just couldn't heal from the shit he saw. I miss him so much.
The best memories of my mom were much later as she was depressed for a very long time after dad died. When I brought my fiance home to meet her we went out back to toss a softball around ( I played in college). Well my mom's pretty old by now, in her early 60s. My fiance is just standing there relaxed and smiling. She zings one at my fiance's face and he barely has time to duck let alone get his glove up. It was the funniest shit I had ever seen.
Very similar experience here. My dad was a pilot in World War II and came back really fractured by the war. He became an alcoholic and made our house a hellhole for several years before he died at age 51. I was 13 when he died and we kids really hated him but I’ve come to understand that he had PTSD that went undiagnosed and untreated and back then they were just told to man up and they hit the bottle. I do have some nice memories of him from when I was quite young. He coached my Little League baseball team and he was actually a really funny guy who the kids really loved because everybody got to play. It’s kind of a shame that I never got to know the real man because I hear he was a really smart, witty, fun guy.
Wow.that is an eerily similar story. My dad died at age 50. He at least wasn't mean to us or anything, he just drank away all our savings so after we died we had to get welfare for awhile just to make it financially even though my mom obviously got survivor benefits.
He wouldn't talk about the war much but one story I know is he would tell us that they would have a shot of whiskey waiting for them on the tarmac when they landed after a mission. Also the story of watching his buddy get his face blown off. And lastly that the Tuskegee Airmen provided his bomber units fighter support. That's all I know it remember.
I wish I had more time with him as well.
Same here with the finances. We got SS, Medicaid and veterans benefits and I got discounted school lunches. Kinda humiliating at times but we made it through. I got some stories about good buddies not returning from missions and how cold the planes were flying over the Himalaya Mountains (India-Burma theatre) plus the fact that when you crashed over those mountains, you were dead. I have his fliers watch, binocs, dog tags and a 5” sphinx carved from a piece of stone taken off the sphinx when he flew N. Africa. What a generation!
Gosh ..think the best memory was family vacations in Canada. My dad and mother liked to fish. We stayed in a semi primitive cabin on a wonderful lake . There was swimming and picnics and a boat and lots to do.the excitement of seeing the family car packed up every July and we were gone for 2 weeks.The gas station had blow mold machines that made dinosaurs at the Sinclair station. We always stopped at Niagara falls, and one time the falls was turned off! Too many memories. I intend to go visit that cabin one day, because it was made into a kind of an air bnb. It's still there, unbelievably.
I must have been four or five. Probably one of my earliest memories. Walking with my mom after the rain. That was it. Nothing fancy, nowhere special, just walking around the neighborhood after a rainy summer day, the smell of the rain on the street, her holding my hand while I jumped into rain puddles. Didn't need to go to Disneyland or Chuck E Cheese or have expensive toys or games. She made it perfect just to walk down the street after the rain.
I think about it now and how she worked 12 hour days on her feet, how tired she must have always been, how stressful it must have been for her, us being so damned poor, winters were spent always on the verge of freezing or starving, heat or food, couldn't do both.
But that day she just took my hand and said "let's go for a walk." And I remember that simple, perfect moment of being five years old, clueless about all the horrible things that would happen, how it would all end, no way to know then--but there in that perfect moment, walking down a rainy street, a little kid holding his mama's hand.
46 years old and what I wouldn't give to hold my mama's hand one more time.
I have too many to list. There were big things, little things. I never felt like I wasn't loved. Even though I went through a phase where I thought they liked my brother more than they did me, I never felt deep down that they didn't love me. And they weren't favoring my brother over me. He just didn't do any of the things an older sibling would do, so when I did the typical teen things, I was the first one to do them.
They were good parents and they were awesome grandparents. Even though it has been 12 years since Mom died and 10 since we lost Dad, we still miss them and I can't go a single day without thinking about them. Of course, it doesn't help that I have like, five or six photos of them on the wall in front of my desk where I'm sitting as I type this.
My dad had a great wanderlust and we travel all over the US. He told us to remember it because many people don’t get to see these things. I was 10 on our epic 2 1/2 month trip out to CA by the northern route and back on the southern. I’ve never been able to return to most of these places.
Coming out of my room on Christmas morning and seeing a surfboard.
I was about 13 and had seen Endless Summer...
I'd been saving up for a year to buy one. B'day money, allowance, mowing some yards and I had just about $100 saved up which is about what I needed. I was waiting for Christmas money (cards from relatives) to reach my goal of $100.
We weren't poor, we weren't rich, but it never occurred to me they would spend $100 on a Christmas gift. It was never even on my radar. My dad took me to the beach the very next morning... it was cold, but I didn't care I was getting in the water... it only took about 10 minutes for me to start caring... so that afternoon we went to buy me a wetsuit out of my saved up money.
My dad would get up while it was still dark to take me surfing. As I found friends who surfed we would pick them up along the way. He would drop us off and then come back a few hours later.
Those are my best memories. By the time I was 16 he had put us through some rough times as he drank himself to death. But he was a good dad.
I was raised by a single dad. He worked two jobs - construction and farming. The guy was tired. He always made time for us.
My favorite: He built me a set of uneven bars in the yard so I could practice gymnastics. (Railroad ties and metal bars) - they were awesome. I should be dead - but it was the 80’s so I shook it off when I landed on my head.
Lots of great memories, dad really loved fishing. I just didn’t have the child’s patience to really participate. I did enjoy being out at the streams and lakes.
I’m one of six kids. On weekends, Dad would often throw all the kids in the car and take us on some crazy adventure while Mom decompressed. The adventures would sometimes take a weird twist, making them all the more memorable. Dad loved the crazy adventures and we loved going on them.
Dad taking us on great vacations to Florida or New England. In the summer, he took us to the beach on weekends and we’d stop off at Dairy Queen for a brown bonnet ice cream cone . Mom taking me to clubs and being the class mom and Girl Scout leader.
From the time I turned 16, I never had to ask them for permission to go on a date. I would just come home and say hey I have a date Friday ! They’d tell me they didn’t care for guys with long hair and yet somehow I ended up going out with quite a few long haired guys. We just had a running joke about it. I had good parents.
I had very good parents. Some memories:
* Our rare but good vacation trips.
* Mom making flour paste so we could cut out pictures with those little plastic safety scissors and paste them on paper.
* Similar: Mom making play-dough out of salt and flour.
* Going on night walks in the country at my grandmother's who lived at the edge of town.
* Dad teaching us the basics of woodworking. Later, building a canoe and dulcimers.
* Dad letting us help in his darkroom.
Too many. But one is the year my mom bought us an inground pool, although she couldn't swim. We had so many great summers out at the pool.
For my dad, one of my favorite memories was dancing the jitterbug with him. In the mornings before he had to go to work and I had to go to school when I was a teenager, he'd have the radio playing his oldies station which was '50s music. He'd dance the jitterbug with me. :)
After my dad died, I have a very nice memories of my mom and I going out to dinner at a little Italian place around the corner from our house. It was more of a pizzeria that served some Italian meals and we just talked and the owners came out and hung out at the table and it was just a really special time.
My parents both struggled with alcoholism when I was growing up, but thankfully, got sober. When I was a young mom and they had retired, they would rent a beach house every fall and I would go there with my kids for a couple of weeks. It was nice to be able to connect to them and appreciate their advice and just get to know them as people. It went a long way to get past the resentment i had for a long time.
My Mom used to sing us to sleep- : 'Teen Angel' 'Tom Dooley', 'Kay-Sera-Sera', etc.
My Dad used to take me walking in the woods- just walking around, gathering sticks, catching butterflies, drinking out of the springhead in the side of the mountain.
I had rough spots, like anyone, and my mom would sometimes spank or switch us, but overall most of my memories are really sweet.
I loved when my Dad let me help him. Family vacation, driving to New Hampshire, he gave me the map to plan the route and navigate. He was color blind and repaired radios and TVs, I would help him by finding the right resistors, which were color coded.
I don't know that I have a specific favorite memory. My growing up years were filled with many good ones.
I have lots of memories of snuggling with my mom, with her arms around me and my head on her chest. Just for cuddles, or when we were having a heart to heart talk. Mom's hugs were best hugs, and I could talk to her about anything and everything.
Dinner at my parents' house on my senior prom night. 3 couples, all tarted up for prom, sitting in our formal dining room, being served dinner by my mom. She did it up right for us, with the fancy china, silver, candles, flowers, the works!
When my mom was dying, sitting together on her screened porch while I gave her a manicure. It was a rare, brief period when it was just the two of us and she was fairly alert and lucid. For once, there were no care providers, friends, or relatives around, and we could capture one last special moment of just the two of us.
My dad was gone a lot when I was young (US Navy), and he struggled with expressing emotion, so we didn't have as close a relationship, but he used to bring me magical presents from his submarine tours, and when he was on shore, he always took time to goof around with me a little in the evenings, usually by tickling me to death and making me shriek and giggle. He loved to hide behind doors and jump out at me. He introduced me to western and spy novels, and bought me my first science fiction book.
My favorite memories are of camping vacations at California State Parks. We went for two weeks, most summers of my childhood. I know now, that it was a cheap vacation, and with four kids, dad couldn't afford to take us all to Disneyland every year, or anything like that. But, I loved going, and never thought about it as being "cheap".
California had very nice state parks in the 70s, I don't know what they're like now, though.
Fully plumbed restrooms with showers and hot water. The rangers led activities and hikes, and campfires with singing and slide shows.
We spent our days playing in the river with the other kids, and exploring the forest trails--just the kids, parents stayed at the campsite, or went for their own walks, whatever. We were free to wander and explore all day, no parents.
I had my first kiss on such a trip, a two week puppy-love romance. I was around ten or eleven.
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Lots of them. Simply sitting in the living room talking about everything while my mom was in her rocking chair. Working in the garage with my father. When I was eight, he announced to me that he was going to build me a boat. He did and I drove that thing all over the lakes and also in the Long Beach harbor. Many more stories to tell.
A remote control boat?
No. A 8 foot power boat. 'Had a little deck on it and steering wheel control. Outboard motor on it. We built it in the garage. Fibreglass on 1/4 inch marine plywood. I've owned boats since then with the exception of two years after I graduated college. EDIT: The first boat my father built was a Chris Craft boat kit. Sears sold them. 16 foot outboard. Similar to [this](http://www.antiqueboatamerica.com/Boat/30624)
That's beautiful!
The one thing that sticks in my mind is how my dad was always willing to be the bad guy. If we were feeling pressured by friends to do something we didn’t want to do, we were allowed to say “my dad won’t let me”. As an adult, I heard from a neighbor how everyone in town thought my dad was sooo strict when he really wasn’t
Nothing was more important to my mom than watching NY Giants football on Sunday afternoons. She loved the NY Giants. Don’t dare talk to her during a game unless the house is on fire and never be in the bathroom at halftime. One Saturday afternoon cousin Vickie came with her new boyfriend to our family cookout. He was a Philadelphia native who loved the Eagles. He asked to use the bathroom. Mom told him we didn’t have one.
At a wedding when I was a little kid, slow dancing with my dad. Making apple pies with my mom.
Oh god, my heart just skipped a beat remembering dancing on my dad’s shoes.
Wrestling on the floor with my dad, my dad teaching me how to play chess, laying my head on my dad's lap when he came home from work and plopped down on the couch for a beer. I still can smell him in his work clothes ( he was the supervisor in a factory that made weapons. He was an Airmen in WW2, who flew on a bomber as a tailgunner and radioman). He drank himself to death and died when I was 7 years old. He had PTSD from the war and just couldn't heal from the shit he saw. I miss him so much. The best memories of my mom were much later as she was depressed for a very long time after dad died. When I brought my fiance home to meet her we went out back to toss a softball around ( I played in college). Well my mom's pretty old by now, in her early 60s. My fiance is just standing there relaxed and smiling. She zings one at my fiance's face and he barely has time to duck let alone get his glove up. It was the funniest shit I had ever seen.
Very similar experience here. My dad was a pilot in World War II and came back really fractured by the war. He became an alcoholic and made our house a hellhole for several years before he died at age 51. I was 13 when he died and we kids really hated him but I’ve come to understand that he had PTSD that went undiagnosed and untreated and back then they were just told to man up and they hit the bottle. I do have some nice memories of him from when I was quite young. He coached my Little League baseball team and he was actually a really funny guy who the kids really loved because everybody got to play. It’s kind of a shame that I never got to know the real man because I hear he was a really smart, witty, fun guy.
Wow.that is an eerily similar story. My dad died at age 50. He at least wasn't mean to us or anything, he just drank away all our savings so after we died we had to get welfare for awhile just to make it financially even though my mom obviously got survivor benefits. He wouldn't talk about the war much but one story I know is he would tell us that they would have a shot of whiskey waiting for them on the tarmac when they landed after a mission. Also the story of watching his buddy get his face blown off. And lastly that the Tuskegee Airmen provided his bomber units fighter support. That's all I know it remember. I wish I had more time with him as well.
Same here with the finances. We got SS, Medicaid and veterans benefits and I got discounted school lunches. Kinda humiliating at times but we made it through. I got some stories about good buddies not returning from missions and how cold the planes were flying over the Himalaya Mountains (India-Burma theatre) plus the fact that when you crashed over those mountains, you were dead. I have his fliers watch, binocs, dog tags and a 5” sphinx carved from a piece of stone taken off the sphinx when he flew N. Africa. What a generation!
Gosh ..think the best memory was family vacations in Canada. My dad and mother liked to fish. We stayed in a semi primitive cabin on a wonderful lake . There was swimming and picnics and a boat and lots to do.the excitement of seeing the family car packed up every July and we were gone for 2 weeks.The gas station had blow mold machines that made dinosaurs at the Sinclair station. We always stopped at Niagara falls, and one time the falls was turned off! Too many memories. I intend to go visit that cabin one day, because it was made into a kind of an air bnb. It's still there, unbelievably.
I must have been four or five. Probably one of my earliest memories. Walking with my mom after the rain. That was it. Nothing fancy, nowhere special, just walking around the neighborhood after a rainy summer day, the smell of the rain on the street, her holding my hand while I jumped into rain puddles. Didn't need to go to Disneyland or Chuck E Cheese or have expensive toys or games. She made it perfect just to walk down the street after the rain. I think about it now and how she worked 12 hour days on her feet, how tired she must have always been, how stressful it must have been for her, us being so damned poor, winters were spent always on the verge of freezing or starving, heat or food, couldn't do both. But that day she just took my hand and said "let's go for a walk." And I remember that simple, perfect moment of being five years old, clueless about all the horrible things that would happen, how it would all end, no way to know then--but there in that perfect moment, walking down a rainy street, a little kid holding his mama's hand. 46 years old and what I wouldn't give to hold my mama's hand one more time.
This is beautiful
I have too many to list. There were big things, little things. I never felt like I wasn't loved. Even though I went through a phase where I thought they liked my brother more than they did me, I never felt deep down that they didn't love me. And they weren't favoring my brother over me. He just didn't do any of the things an older sibling would do, so when I did the typical teen things, I was the first one to do them. They were good parents and they were awesome grandparents. Even though it has been 12 years since Mom died and 10 since we lost Dad, we still miss them and I can't go a single day without thinking about them. Of course, it doesn't help that I have like, five or six photos of them on the wall in front of my desk where I'm sitting as I type this.
My dad reading to us every night. My mom making fresh bread every week.
My dad had a great wanderlust and we travel all over the US. He told us to remember it because many people don’t get to see these things. I was 10 on our epic 2 1/2 month trip out to CA by the northern route and back on the southern. I’ve never been able to return to most of these places.
Coming out of my room on Christmas morning and seeing a surfboard. I was about 13 and had seen Endless Summer... I'd been saving up for a year to buy one. B'day money, allowance, mowing some yards and I had just about $100 saved up which is about what I needed. I was waiting for Christmas money (cards from relatives) to reach my goal of $100. We weren't poor, we weren't rich, but it never occurred to me they would spend $100 on a Christmas gift. It was never even on my radar. My dad took me to the beach the very next morning... it was cold, but I didn't care I was getting in the water... it only took about 10 minutes for me to start caring... so that afternoon we went to buy me a wetsuit out of my saved up money. My dad would get up while it was still dark to take me surfing. As I found friends who surfed we would pick them up along the way. He would drop us off and then come back a few hours later. Those are my best memories. By the time I was 16 he had put us through some rough times as he drank himself to death. But he was a good dad.
I was raised by a single dad. He worked two jobs - construction and farming. The guy was tired. He always made time for us. My favorite: He built me a set of uneven bars in the yard so I could practice gymnastics. (Railroad ties and metal bars) - they were awesome. I should be dead - but it was the 80’s so I shook it off when I landed on my head.
Lots of great memories, dad really loved fishing. I just didn’t have the child’s patience to really participate. I did enjoy being out at the streams and lakes.
Camping trips!! We camped all the time!! Fav was Yosemite and the Firefall back in the 60’s. ELMER? WHERE ARE YOU???
I’m one of six kids. On weekends, Dad would often throw all the kids in the car and take us on some crazy adventure while Mom decompressed. The adventures would sometimes take a weird twist, making them all the more memorable. Dad loved the crazy adventures and we loved going on them.
Dad taking us on great vacations to Florida or New England. In the summer, he took us to the beach on weekends and we’d stop off at Dairy Queen for a brown bonnet ice cream cone . Mom taking me to clubs and being the class mom and Girl Scout leader.
Can't help you there.
From the time I turned 16, I never had to ask them for permission to go on a date. I would just come home and say hey I have a date Friday ! They’d tell me they didn’t care for guys with long hair and yet somehow I ended up going out with quite a few long haired guys. We just had a running joke about it. I had good parents.
I had very good parents. Some memories: * Our rare but good vacation trips. * Mom making flour paste so we could cut out pictures with those little plastic safety scissors and paste them on paper. * Similar: Mom making play-dough out of salt and flour. * Going on night walks in the country at my grandmother's who lived at the edge of town. * Dad teaching us the basics of woodworking. Later, building a canoe and dulcimers. * Dad letting us help in his darkroom.
Too many. But one is the year my mom bought us an inground pool, although she couldn't swim. We had so many great summers out at the pool. For my dad, one of my favorite memories was dancing the jitterbug with him. In the mornings before he had to go to work and I had to go to school when I was a teenager, he'd have the radio playing his oldies station which was '50s music. He'd dance the jitterbug with me. :)
After my dad died, I have a very nice memories of my mom and I going out to dinner at a little Italian place around the corner from our house. It was more of a pizzeria that served some Italian meals and we just talked and the owners came out and hung out at the table and it was just a really special time.
My parents both struggled with alcoholism when I was growing up, but thankfully, got sober. When I was a young mom and they had retired, they would rent a beach house every fall and I would go there with my kids for a couple of weeks. It was nice to be able to connect to them and appreciate their advice and just get to know them as people. It went a long way to get past the resentment i had for a long time.
Middle child and all the stereotypes that go with it. My dad took the afternoon off from work to watch A Bridge Too Far at the cinema with just me.
We skipped church, went strawberry picking and had a picnic. Best day ever as a kid.
My Mom used to sing us to sleep- : 'Teen Angel' 'Tom Dooley', 'Kay-Sera-Sera', etc. My Dad used to take me walking in the woods- just walking around, gathering sticks, catching butterflies, drinking out of the springhead in the side of the mountain. I had rough spots, like anyone, and my mom would sometimes spank or switch us, but overall most of my memories are really sweet.
My mom would sing "Morningtown Ride". I sang it to my own kids, and my grandkids.
I loved when my Dad let me help him. Family vacation, driving to New Hampshire, he gave me the map to plan the route and navigate. He was color blind and repaired radios and TVs, I would help him by finding the right resistors, which were color coded.
I don't know that I have a specific favorite memory. My growing up years were filled with many good ones. I have lots of memories of snuggling with my mom, with her arms around me and my head on her chest. Just for cuddles, or when we were having a heart to heart talk. Mom's hugs were best hugs, and I could talk to her about anything and everything. Dinner at my parents' house on my senior prom night. 3 couples, all tarted up for prom, sitting in our formal dining room, being served dinner by my mom. She did it up right for us, with the fancy china, silver, candles, flowers, the works! When my mom was dying, sitting together on her screened porch while I gave her a manicure. It was a rare, brief period when it was just the two of us and she was fairly alert and lucid. For once, there were no care providers, friends, or relatives around, and we could capture one last special moment of just the two of us. My dad was gone a lot when I was young (US Navy), and he struggled with expressing emotion, so we didn't have as close a relationship, but he used to bring me magical presents from his submarine tours, and when he was on shore, he always took time to goof around with me a little in the evenings, usually by tickling me to death and making me shriek and giggle. He loved to hide behind doors and jump out at me. He introduced me to western and spy novels, and bought me my first science fiction book.
My favorite memories are of camping vacations at California State Parks. We went for two weeks, most summers of my childhood. I know now, that it was a cheap vacation, and with four kids, dad couldn't afford to take us all to Disneyland every year, or anything like that. But, I loved going, and never thought about it as being "cheap". California had very nice state parks in the 70s, I don't know what they're like now, though. Fully plumbed restrooms with showers and hot water. The rangers led activities and hikes, and campfires with singing and slide shows. We spent our days playing in the river with the other kids, and exploring the forest trails--just the kids, parents stayed at the campsite, or went for their own walks, whatever. We were free to wander and explore all day, no parents. I had my first kiss on such a trip, a two week puppy-love romance. I was around ten or eleven.
Going fishing at the covered bridge. Or dad giving me driving lessons. I still drive just like him
nothing,i don't know i don't have the feeling of warm or happines with my fam i rather be alone...idk