They used to call them the small hours of the morning. 2, 3, 4 am…. small numbers, big eyes. All night long, I am up and down, rolling over, blankets on, blankets off, unable to sleep. Brain churning. Too late? Too early? To take a sleeping pill. Tomorrow–.today is going to be hell.
The talk radio inside my head gets especially loud in the small hours. I replay scenarios from the day, 10 years ago, my childhood, and ones that haven’t happened yet. I worry. I fret. I’d bite my nails but I gave up that habit decades ago.
My clearest memories begin when I was about 8. Things before that are just blurry snapshots of isolated events – none of them particularly memorable which makes it a mystery as to why I remember them.
Fifth grade is especially vivid. At school, they had started a new program for 5th graders. Funny, I remember the acronym SQ3. It involved us going from classroom to classroom for different teachers. I didn’t like it. Though we didn’t know it then, I was ADD and that disruption of moving from one class to another was a form of sabotage. While I remember my 3rd and 4th grade teachers, vividly, I have no idea who taught me in the 5th grade. Mostly, I just remember moving from one class to another. I do kind of remember the guy who taught us History. I wrote an extra credit report on Marco Polo. He questioned whether I wrote it or not. He said it sounded too grownup. I was shocked that he would think I had cheated. I assured him I had written it.
M. Lynne Squires interviewed me for the Library Television Network. I got to talk about the new book, my writing, the Women of Appalachia Women Speak Project, what I’m currently working on, and all sorts of things. I had a ball.
I’ll be 70 in 7 years and the 70s were my playground. I was 10 going on 11 when they started. It was then that I discovered the power of music to inspire, soothe, invoke love, and provoke dance.
Piaget’s Theory of the Four Cognitive Periods of childhood development are Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years old) Preoperational stage (2–7 years old) Concrete operational stage (7–11 years old) Formal operational stage (11 years old through adulthood). Piaget was a famous Swiss child psychologist. My friend Dale always maintained that the Fourth Stage was The Lyrics Acquisition Phase followed by the Operational Stage as the Fifth.
I agree.
I came of age during the 70s and the early 80s. Didn’t dive into real adulthood, whatever real might mean, until I was 25. Before that, I was a party girl. Party girl in the sense that I was out with friends all the time — all the time — loading lyrics into my brain. We were dancing, we were at concerts, we were cruising around listening to the car stereo, we were in someone’s basement listening to Pink Floyd until 2, 3, and 4 a.m.
W. Va. Fur and Root 