When I think of the past at the time when I was a child, I have serious difficulties remembering friends or emotions, but I remember “episodes”.
I’m talking of the time when I was seriously a child, before the stage of my adolescence.
I have memories of a few episodes in my mind, and some are really special because I was really really young, and I feel amazed to remember so well. Still, they are episodes particular in my mind and in my memories.
Some of those are before I was five.
Three in particular:
- I drop my father’s motorbike. I get scared. I was afraid he will get angry with me, and I decided to hide in the grass in front of the entrance to the house. I was at most 4 years old. My parents call me, I didn’t answer. I keep myself hidden. They start to get scared. The neighbours arrive to help them look for me at the near river. They find me after more than an hour and when I explain the reason for being hidden, only then do they realize that the motorbike was overturned on the ground. They didn’t care about it; they were shacking.
- My sister was born recently, a few months. I was alone in front of her pram, and she was awake and smiling. I am eating candy at the same time, and I felt guilty. I have another candy in my pocket. It is perfect, and I want her to eat it too. So, I did the most natural thing a brother could do it. I put the candy in her mouth. In one second, she stops to smile and start to be short of breath. Change colour in her face. She can’t breathe. I begin to panic. Luckily my mother was in the next room and runs desperately to free her from the candy. With sharp blows on her back, the candy that was suffocating her comes out and smashes on the wall. I was impressed with everything. My first experience of Sci-Fi Movie
- My mother had sympathy for a football team: Inter Milan. I am almost four years old, and of course, I like the team my mum support. The team of our town are going to play for the first time ever versus them. So, one Sunday my uncle takes me to the “Amsicora” stadium in Cagliari to see them play against Inter Milan. I don’t remember anything of the game, just I was seat near the corner kick. My uncle said to me “Look, that’s Corso” and then, in another corner kick, “That’s Jair.” All there in front of my eyes.
Subsequently, the episodes dilute and move over time, one of these is linked to a snowfall in 1966
In Cagliari it never (almost) snows and when it happens, the dates remind them all for centuries.
It wasn’t a significant snowfall. But just enough for the school to be closed. My mother tries anyway to bring me to school, and since the gate was closed, we went to the nearby Bar. Apparently was a new business in those days; The name of the Bar was “Jolly“, and they made fantastic puff pastries.
It was perhaps the first time that I sat in a bar. My mother was talking to someone, and I was eating my pastry.
“Le Sfoglie”: The best Pastry in the World
The Bar “Jolly” still exists, it always makes these fantastic pastries “Le Sfoglie”. That it’s the Italian name for “sheets” and every time I am in Cagliari I go there for a coffee and one of those pastries which for me remains one of the best I have ever eaten anywhere in the world for breakfast.
Why did I tell you this story? Simple. This year I will be (in November) sixty years old and as I am making the list of the most significant music in my life, I have decided to write some important stories from my past as well. Especially that of my adolescence. In the end it’s my blog and I can also use it as a personal diary. why not?
Massimo