Sometimes, In This Space, I Write About My Childhood

Someone who sometimes reads this blog told me tonight she'd like to read more about my childhood. She also raised the excellent point that there is a great deal of shooting from the hip criticizing in the Jewish blogosphere (not by me). She (and I agree) is not pleased with a certain disrespect and an attitude that implies that all opinions are equally valid and anyone one can critique anyone else with no regard to rank, integrity, etc.

I am more interested in the issue of my childhood than in how other bloggers blog. One post that comes to mind is the 3 part series about my Hebrew name and the ramifications in my life via my unusual name , Natah (1, 2, 3).

I just started searching for other past posts that reference my childhood and found these five questions and answers which include a little bit of juice from that time of my life.

Then there's the slide, which I've written about several times. The first time I mentioned it was exactly four years ago, here. (The story is that I got in trouble for climbing up a slide, but I was only doing what felt safe to me. This comes up a lot in life and blogging.) (I also wrote about the slide incident here and in response to a comment from kind Pearl I wrote up a memory of being tripped by a counselor. This other story pops into my mind on various occasion on both a literal and metaphorical level).

In this post about Teshuva, I wonder who reads this - something I often do, and tie in the slide story (I am enjoying seeing all the comments in each of these posts). In this post I tell the slide story again and say it happened in second grade, rather than first. This raises the question of memory and how stories change from time to time. In my school we were in one building for first and second and another for 3-8. All I recall for sure is that this happened in the old building. Here, I wrote about man's inhumanity about man and said I was doing so in my own, up the slide way. The comments on this one are really nice.

Here, I recall an incident from youth involving a misbehaving classmate, and write some other memories too. In this post I write about sundry things (maybe I'll do that again here someday), including my childhood friend Quigley. In this piece, Life, Like Rain, A Masterpiece, I remember the game Masterpiece, which my family played together many times, when I was a boy.

Here, I write about feeling like I've lived more than one life within my life (and Maayan and Jack say they've felt that way too). In this post (which sparked a classic Kishke - RR dialogue) I recall what I used to say as my parents put me to bed as a child.

Speaking of going to bed...