First Memory

Lead or Follow blog gave me the inspiration for a series of posts. They will be some of the first and some of my most potent memories. I think this is a great activity to chronicle these memories now so as to avoid losing them in the future.

First Memory: 1984 Building Blocks Montessori School Staten Island, NY, age 4.
The memory of this school is extremely vivid in my mind. I think its because I used to love going to this place. It was where I had preschool, it was the afternoon session. My teachers names were Barsha and Claudia. Barsha was Indian and she would teach us about dinosaurs, a topic dear to my heart. Claudia was Spanish and she would teach us about classical music, specifically Beethoven and Mozart.

My best friend was named Jeremy. He and I used to play with the blocks a lot. We used to like to play with certain blocks in particular. They were stored inside wooden boxes with sliding lids on them. We used to arrange the blocks inside their containing boxes and stand them on their ends so that the bottom of the boxes were facing us. We would pretend the boxes were TVs and they would break and we'd go behind the boxes and rearrange the blocks thus fixing our TVs. I remember Barsha and Claudia not liking that we did that and they continually told us to play with the blocks and not the boxes. I never understood why.

I remember during thanksgiving we had a turkey trot competition. The girl who won was named Amanda. She had dressed up as a panda for halloween earlier in the year and we all called her Amanda the panda. Her prize for winning the turkey trot, a Lite Brite. I was jealous and I think I also had a slight crush on her.

The thing I remember very well was when my grandmother used to pick me up from school. She would always be there on time waiting in her cream colored Buick Riviera with a red vinyl roof on the back. I remember the interior was velvety red and comfortable. She drove fast. My grandmother also kept a glass jar of Planter's peanuts under the seat and she'd let me eat them as she drove us home. Some days she would take me to McDonalds for a happy meal and watch me play on the slides. She would always tell me, "Don't let the other kids push you. If they do, you push them back. You're MY grandson!"