Chapter 3: The Joys of Childhood
Early this morning, my son came to my room every day with a small electric excavator and told me to get up.
It's been a long time since I slept in a separate room with my wife, and maybe our relationship has long since died in name.
Seeing my son's happy face also reminds me of the joy of my childhood.
Before I went to kindergarten, I always played at home or downstairs. There are not many peers around, so I can only be a little bully at home and bully my fifth sister. Except for the nephew who came to play with me occasionally, only food was my company. Fried chicken wings, Huafeng instant noodles, lemon tea, canned fish. My breakfast is served with instant noodles and canned fish, or bread, fritters and soy milk.
Every day after breakfast, he rode around the long aisle on a children's version of the red tricycle, and once fell down the stairs, broke his nose and bled all over the ground.
As I grew up, I went to kindergarten, and next door was my aunt's brother's house, which I called uncle.
I remember the first time I went to school, it was generally resisted by children, and I had to stay there all day. In an unfamiliar environment, I didn't even dare to ask the teacher to urinate during my lunch break, and yes, I couldn't help but wet the bed. On the top bunk of the double iron frame bed, the urine flowed down the gap in the bed board and drenched the little friend on the lower bunk. Then my friend went to the teacher to complain, and the teacher asked me why, I remember that I was holding back the kidney pain at that time, but I just cried and didn't say anything.
On the first day I went to school, I didn't prepare spare pants, so the teacher washed the pants to dry, and I didn't wear pants, so it was cool all afternoon. When my mother picked me up from school, the teacher explained the situation, and my mother said a few words to me out of the face of the problem.
I don't think my mother really loves me, she doesn't treat me like a mother, and she will take her anger out on me as much as my father spills it on her. My sister said that I had tried to be hung up and beaten when I was naughty when I was young.
The lucky people use their childhood to heal their whole lives, and the unfortunate people use their lives to heal their childhood.
I can't tell if my childhood was used to heal my whole life or my whole life to heal my childhood.
In order to prevent teachers from calling parents, they can only obediently abide by discipline when they go to kindergarten. I don't know why, it's quite popular with female classmates, or because male classmates often bully me. The female classmate who played the best with me was called Xiaoyan, and one day she brought a copy of "Gourd Baby" from home, saying that she was going to give it to me. I was very happy that day, because it was the first time someone else had given me a gift, although the next day she asked for the book back, and she said that her father did not allow it. But it doesn't hinder the two of us to play together, and if I have any fun and delicious food, I will bring her a copy.
In the kindergarten trick-or-treating, I also tried to dump the cold boiled water from the kettle I brought to school and secretly fill it with the pineapple beer left over from the festival. During recess, I twisted the lid and took a sweet sip, although my family has no objection to drinking this during the festival, but I don't know if I can bring it to the kindergarten. At this time, a little male classmate smelled the fragrance of malt and locked his eyes on me, and he came up to me and asked, "Have you drunk pineapple beer?"
I shook my head, "Plain water, you'll get drunk if you drink this beer!" After saying that, I tried to prove it to him and took another sip.
The little male classmate looked at me and left without saying anything. I patted my chest and drank it all in one gulp. When I came home from school, my mother found out that it was not plain water when she washed the kettle, and of course she was beaten and scolded.
......
During the winter vacation, as I grew up, my mother also took me back to my parents' home to save my family. My mother's maiden home is a county town surrounded by mountains, and my aunt and aunt both live in the mountains and have to walk a little way to get there, while my uncle's house is on the side of the road.
My father rarely went back to his parents' house with us, and he wanted to take the trainees with him. One morning during the winter vacation, my mother and I ate breakfast and took our three-wheeled motorcycle to the station to take the shuttle bus back to my parents' house. When I was a child, I would get motion sickness, smelling the smell of incompletely burning gasoline mixed with the special smell of the shuttle, and it was uncomfortable to sit at the X County bus station.
"Mom, let's have lunch here and then go in!" I said palely.
"Okay!" the mother went to a nearby restaurant and ordered a few dishes and white rice.
After a while, I had to take the shuttle bus into the mountain to my uncle's house first. The ruggedness of the mountain road, the shuttle bus will go down the mountain for a while, and finally, I get motion sickness and vomit, a green vegetable is held in my hand, and my mother is squinting and resting.
"Mom, I threw up. I was a little embarrassed to say.
"Have you eaten too much?" said my mother, reproaching me as she cleaned up the filth, muttering to herself, "No wonder I smelled greens just now."
I don't know how many turns I turned, how many slopes I came up, and I came to my uncle's house. No different from a rural house in the 90s, a 2-storey fire brick house. As a city born, I am very afraid of walking on country roads, afraid of cow dung, chicken manure, and many field paths along the way, I don't know how to walk, I don't know if it is a bad sense of balance, it is always easy to "hit the street", and have a close contact with the soil.
There is no entertainment in the countryside, so my uncle's cousin took me to hunt birds, and at night he took me to catch pheasants. Until now, I was also afraid of catching chickens, ducks, white pigeons, etc., and I was afraid of touching anything that could move and eat anyway.
Maybe because I was a child and reached out and asked me to slaughter them, bleed and pluck their hair, I didn't dare.
In addition to these daily entertainments, what makes me happiest is the polder day in the county, some people come out to set up stalls, some people come out to take advantage of the polder day, and we belong to the latter.
In addition to some snacks, there are more hand-crafted bamboo crops suitable for agriculture such as baskets, and the villagers have no extra pastime in the evening, so everyone gathers around and chats while weaving. My brother-in-law was on the other side of the county, and when I first arrived, he had already built a bungalow, which belonged to the richest of my mother's sisters, and his family was still in the snow strip business. When I was a child, I liked to go to my uncle's house the most, and I could eat and drink snow sticks and ice water, but the most memorable thing was mung bean snow sticks.
My mother's mother's family had many children, most of them more than three, and my family and my half-brother only had two children. In addition to visiting my parents' relatives, I think my mother wanted to see my half-brother more, and my brother also took advantage of the situation with us, and he never said anything, and my mother kept asking him what he wanted to eat and buy, as if to make up for the guilt of not being around all the time. It was the first time I knew that I had such an older brother, and my mother asked me to call him "Brother Izumi".
Children don't have much of the mind of adults, and gradually we get acquainted, even though our true identity is embarrassing. My mother bought my brother some clothes and ended up taking pictures at the photo studio.
The picture of me and my brother being photographed was frozen when I was 6 years old, and I didn't understand what I understood.