5 posts tagged “childhood”

My favorite Muppet is Oscar the Grouch. He always seemed the most realistic muppet. Plus he lived in the coolest place on earth!

What was your most memorable or favorite school field trip?

Neil Diamond I Am... I Said

Don McLean - And I Love You So (London 1980)

My entire 4th grade was a series of field trips. I was placed in the "experimental" classroom, which meant that we had a yearlong project sanding down and refinishing our wooden cubby tables and went on a field trip every week. On the trips, if you were particularly unfortunate, you would ride to the field trip in Mr. Ellsworth's car. Our progressive teacher was fond of only two singers: Neil Diamond and Don McLean. Fond in the way that addicts are fond of heroin. He had outfitted his Pinto station wagon with a quadraphonic 8-track audio system through which these great singer songwriters made themselves heard throughout vast parking lots. To this day, I can sing most of the Diamond oevre to that year and know more than a dozen of the McLean songs that aren't BBAP. As Ellsworth often said, "McLean's other songs are completely underrated. BBAP is far from his best, in fact." And I can bear witness.

Our actual destinations paled in comparison to this mobile musical education. Being in the Boston area, we went to the Gillette factory, a Ford factory, some canning factory, Fruitlands, the New England Aquarium, the North End, Olde Sturbridge Village, Mount Wachusett, the Concord Bridge, Minuteman National Park, the Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, Old Ironsides, Bunker Hill Monument, Longfellow's Wayside Inn and Grist Mill, the Old North Church, Ralph Waldo Emerson's home and Walden Pond, Hancock Shaker Village, more cemetaries than I care to remember, and at least six petting zoos for good measure.

Green_bean_casserole

Sorry. I didn't despise any foods as a child. At least not any that I was offered. There were foods I found very strange, like my grandmother's variation of the durkee's green bean casserole in which minute rice (substituting for the beans) was topped with campbell's cream of mushroom soup un- or slightly diluted and finished with those very odd crispy onions in a can. I can't say that I liked it, but I don't remember despising it. Nor would I enjoy it now.

Carson's favorite is Life. I remember loving Risk as a teen. Honestly, they all bore me today. Now card games are a very different matter!

Passionate Spectator

Eric Kraft

2 comments

You can start with just about any of my dad's books. I have a special fondness for Reservations Recommended but Amazon doesn't have a picture. You can find out more here.