constance | top five childhood memories

Most of them have to do with books or sleep. I am predictable that way.

I don't know how old I am, but I'm very young, maybe four. I'm in the front bench seat with my parents in my grandfather's truck; they've borrowed it to do some toting around, probably, and probably they're being nice and running it through a car wash before they return it. I'm lying across their laps, because these are the days when kids rattle around in cars like marbles in a box, and I'm half asleep, and they're talking quietly, too quietly for me to hear over the rush of the water, but every time my father says something, I feel his voice resonate against the side of my head. The car is cool and dim and blue, and by the time the truck's clean, I am fully asleep.

I am seven, and camping out for the first time with my Bluebird troop at Camp Ruth Lee. Our cabin is a treehouse, screened all the way around and surrounded by woods, and we are as loud and giggly and screamy as you'd expect seven-year-old girls to be on an occasion like that. Our parents -- half the troop's mothers are chaperoning -- are at one end of the cabin, painting their toenails, and we are flying around the room like monkeys. We put on a play, and eat s'mores, and have our own toenails painted, and when it's time for bed, the crickets and frogs take over.

(I think, from this experience, that I love camping; I try it again a couple of times at organized summer camp, though, and hate it, too many strangers, too much activity. Thinking about this contrast, later, is the first time I consciously realize that I'm happiest when surrounded by people I know well -- and not too many of those -- and that I prefer making my own entertainment to having it thrust on me.)

I am ten, and my parents have gone to Galveston with my brother and some family friends on vacation, and I've requested a bye on this vacation, since I loathe the family friends' little boy, a smarmy little rat fink if you ever saw one. My parents drop me off at my grandparents' house instead.

This is the Gulf Coast in August. Which is hurricane season. And without warning (that's what it seems like to me, anyway), we're plunged into the middle of David. It hits the Texas coast, as if it's made a beeline straight for my parents, but Lake Charles gets plenty of water too, and we spend hours on the phones making sure everyone's okay, but then my grandmother, sensing that probably I need to get out of the house, decides to take me to work with her for the day. She's a reference librarian, and the library's a temporary corrugated iron building that looks like an auto parts store, and we drive through inches of water and spend the day at the library, which is sepia-tinted from the weird light the weather's giving off. I have doughnuts and spin around in desk chairs and someone shows me how the mimeograph machine works, and I read and read and read, and the whole time the rain is pounding on the tin roof and the busy street outside has become a river.

I loved libraries before this. But this weekend kicks off a positive fetish for them.

I'm still ten. My family is spending a Saturday at their best friends' house, the friends with the aforementioned rat-fink son, and I can't do what I always do at their house, which is read myself into oblivion in their study, because I've forgotten my book and my heartless father won't take me home to get it, and so I go digging through the friends' bookshelves. I've had luck in the past before, after all; hey, it's how I found Ashes in the Wind, the likes of which I had never before seen and read in a series of installments; for weeks I couldn't wait for the next time we went over to the H family's house, and if my parents wondered why, they never asked, which, you know, is probably a good thing.

This week's search only yields one book that looks interesting, though, a cheap crumbling scholastic paperback edition of a book called Pride and Prejudice, and I almost immediately love it with a passion I have rarely felt, before or since, for a book. I can't even explain why I love it, exactly. I'm too young for it; half its subtleties go straight over my head, and I won't grow into them for several years. It's nothing like any book I've ever read. I am so enraptured over it that J, whose book it is, makes a present of it to me. (I keep it until it completely disintegrates, which is not until my mid-twenties.) It is pale green and blue, with a line drawing in green ink of a pretty girl on the cover. It smells musty. The pages are desiccated and extremely fragile. It is one of the top five best gifts I've ever received. It is a revelation.

I am eleven. My friend S is having a slumber party, and her parents have decided we are old enough to sleep outside the house in their camper, which oh my god we are incoherent with excitement over this. We celebrate our newfound freedom by reading back issues of Bananas, Cracked, and Mad, playing Mad Libs, recording incisive political satires (it is an election year) on a portable cassette recorder, dancing to our two favorite songs ("King Tut" and "Another Brick in the Wall"), and otherwise making that poor old camper rattle. S's father, Mr. T, has to come out several times to tell us to pipe down. They can hear our shrieks from inside the house. We fall asleep at God knows what hour listening to Eric Clapton's "Cocaine," which would probably give S's parents an aneurism if they knew.

There are many other slumber parties with this same group of girls -- we were inseparable for five years, after all -- and they are all great, but this one is the best.