Family

The Peace of a Bookstore.

Daily Life, Family, Musings Leave a comment

I love book stores. Public Libraries to a lesser extent, but not school libraries.

I feel a sense of peace, just being in a bookstore. Walking in, fills me with a calming feeling. Even if I can’t read the books, I feel this calm. the smell of the books, and the quiet of the store.

My local bookstore has no English books anymore. I still love going in there. I can escape into the shelves. They have tables and chairs set up for people to just sit and read their new books at. People sit in the children’s book area reading quietly with their kids. But it is all so quiet, and calming.

These people get it. Books relax.

Every time I think about physical book stores closing in favor of online stores, I feel like crying. Any other store, I don’t mind being online. But book stores need to be real.

Some of my best memories are getting lost in bookstores around the world. I will happily get lost just looking over the titles, and selections available.

There was a bookstore downtown Beijing. It was in the WangFuJing tourist district. It was called the “Beijing Foreign Language Bookstore”. When we arrived in Beijing, it was a four story shop. the top floor was first language books. English and Japanese novels. All age levels, and genres. 3rd floor was textbooks and educational books for learning foreign languages. 2nd and first floors were for the travel guides, information books about places, and other Local information books in English.

For years I loved taking the children there. We would go there almost monthly. I loved it as much as the kids did.

During the Pandemic, the bookstore shrank down to 1 floor. The books were damaged, and on sale. It was now only the foreign novels. The place had lost its lifestream, and was struggling to stay open. It lost. I tried to go there a few months ago, and it was locked up with a “for rent” sign on the door.

I was heartbroken.

Even though I cannot read the books at our local shop, I still patronize them. My wife and I will get bookmarks, notebooks, trinkets, whatever we can to keep the store open.

Please everyone, don’t buy books from online sources if you can. Go to your local bookstore. If they don’t have the book you want, they can order it for you. Don’t let bookstores and libraries close.

Memories vs Reality

Autism, Daily Life, Family, Musings, , , , , One comment

Throughout my life I have done and seen many things. I have some great memories. I have amazing memories of going places. I have wonderful memories of meeting people. I have memories that are not accurate. I have memories that nobody else has.

This always baffled me growing up. I remember experiencing a lot of things, or being told things. I remember seeing things happening. I remember things happening to me. But when I asked people about them. nobody else remembers, or they remember it extremely different.

Tire Swing

Probably the most prominent one is the Tire Swing incident. When I was very young we moved around town a lot. My Mom and Dad had separated when I was still in diapers. So Mom moved to the City nearby. One of the places we lived at was a white condominium. There were 4 buildings all arranged in a rectangle, leaving a kind of paved courtyard in the middle. The courtyard had space at two corners for cars to enter and drive around inside. This happened before My Mom married my step father.

The other 2 corners had space for people to walk through. I remember one corner had a tire swing set up. The tire swing was one where the tire was laying horizontal. It was attached by 4 chains to a central pivot in the frame. The tire could spin or swing.

I don’t remember how old I was exactly when we moved here. But I was lower elementary age. probably 6 or 7 years old. I do remember clear as a bell that one day I was on the swing. I think two of my brothers were, there. Some older boys came in through the corner path, and saw me on the swing. I can still see the face of one of the boys. He had curly light brown hair. They grabbed the swing and spun it as fast as they could go.

I flew off the swing at top speed because I could not hold on. I tried my hardest, but it was just not in the cards for me. As I flew off, I hit the speckled wall. These buildings had little bits of quartz or white rock as a weather proofing sticking out of them.

I hit the wall. and most of the boys ran off. I blacked out. Somebody carried me home.

This did not happen, according to my family.

Apparently, I did have an incident on a tire swing like this, while in upper elementary. I was across the street at the school. This was after we had finally managed to buy a house. My mom and stepfather had been married a number of years at this point.

In the version everyone else remembers, but I do not. I was at the school across the street, (I should have been 11 or 12 at this point). Some bigger boys, probably High School students came through the school grounds. They spun the tire swing really fast as before and I flew off of the swing. But instead of hitting the gravel-ridden building wall, I hit the metal frame of the tire swing.

huh.

Mom’s had Enough.

Another situation that I can remember is different. I believe we were at the condominiums that I mentioned before. Mom was still trying to put her life back together. She was preparing for a date, and of course us boys were being crazy. There were four of us, so we were loud. But I don’t remember being loud or bad. I remember being in the living room.

I remember clearly Mom getting so frustrated. Eventually she had enough and threatened to leave us there, never to return. She stepped outside when she said this. She had not even gone to the curb when she came back to apologize.

This memory is carved in my mind. To this day, I get anxious seeing children take advantage of their parents. The feeling is worse when I see parents losing their temper at their kids.

Never happened, according to my family.

I love my mom. As a father I can sympathize as to how stressed she would have had to have been to say that. But apparently, my Grandmother had done this very same thing. Mom had never told us about it until I brought up my memory. She had promised herself to never pull that on her own kids because grandma had done it.

Head Full of Tubes.

As a child I remember mom telling me clearly about when I was a baby. Mom told me about how when I was born there was something wrong. I remember being told that I had a swelling on my brain or something on the day I was born. Mom told me that the doctors had rushed me off to intensive unit. I was told that they had to put tubes into my head. These tubes were to relieve pressure on my brain. If they had not relieved the pressure, I would have died.

Not only did this conversation never happen, but I did not have tubes in my head as a baby.

I have more memories that are seemingly false too. To this day, I am not 100% sure of my long term memory. There are a lot of things from my childhood that might still turn out to be false. I don’t know. I will hold onto these memories tightly even if they are not real. They are part of me. These memories that I have helped shape me into who I am, even if they are not true.

What makes me worried the most is that I do have family that has difficulty with the same issues. Memories of things that didn’t happen. But their memories are much more recent, and they are not always convinced that the memory is false. I worry about them. I also have fears that this could be my future.

Playgrounds: Fun & Games or Danger?

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As a parent, living abroad, I have had a very hard time finding free places for my children to play. This has been an ongoing difficulty for the last 18 years. Parks and recreation areas exist, but are not geared for children.

In Beijing, there are a lot of green space parks. I see them all around the city. We walk through them and can relax easily. The one thing I have noticed about these parks, is that they are often equipped with outdoor exercise equipment. Equipment that is suited for the aging senior citizen population. There are no swings, or see saws, or climbing rigs. Instead there are walkers, and stair climbers, and rigs for rotating arms and wrists.

I asked someone about this once. I was told that children needed to use their energy to study and prepare for adulthood. After retirement, they could play.

Apartment compounds are similarly equipped for seniors. The one compound we lived in did have an aging wooden climbing rig with some metal rocking horses on springs. but they were falling apart and not cared for at all. It had no children playing at it.

The school I worked for years at fluctuated on this. When I joined 18 years ago, they had a jungle gym with a slide, climbing bars and stepping stones. Less than a year after I joined a little boy got hurt on the rig. The school removed it to avoid a lawsuit. For the next 2 years there was no playground, just a running track, and soccer field.

Three years later, they installed some new climbing bars. That same year, a girl fell off them and banged her head on the bars on the way down. They were dug up and removed.

5 years later they installed a swing set near the front gate. The security guards would keep an eye on it. I am not clear on the cause, but within a month, they removed the swing and left the frame.

Every few years the school would put something in, and within 2 or 3 months it would be gone.

For the entire primary school years of my two older children, we had to pay for them to enter private playgrounds. They would appear at supermarkets, or malls. However, as soon as there was enough Yearly passes sold, they would disappear. Few of them stayed open. and they were always packed.

I asked one of my son’s classmate’s parents once about how they arranged social time. I was told, that they arranged for their child to attend the same math classes and English classes after school as their friends. Then they could play in class. This seemed to be the general consensus. We did eventually get my son to be able to visit his friend’s house to play a few times. My daughter was not so lucky.

When we moved to my new school I thought things might be different. The school has a lovely playground, and it takes care of it. During the pandemic, my children had free reign over the playground with the other kids that lived on campus. It was great.

Kids at this school had to have insurance. It was a requirement to even register with the school. So if a child gets hurt, the parents wouldn’t sue the school. Theoretically.

Last summer they replaced the playground with a great big new playground. It has climbing poles, and nets, and slides, and in one area 3 roundabouts. 2 that you can sit on and 1 that you hang from.

Well a little girl was on the roundabout and flew off while it was spinning. So the school welded them all still. The kids, being kids, broke the weld by forcing the roundabouts around. and the school bolted them.

So now we have 3 brand new roundabouts that are useless, and are just seats, or hanging bars.

My point with all this is this. When did society decide that children cannot play? Or that they can only play where there is a profit to be made from them?

I remember being thrown off of a seesaw when I was a child. I lost a tooth, and bloodied my nose. It was terrifying, and I don’t recommend it. But from my experience, everyone nearby learned. The compound kept the seesaw. When the other kids played on it, they made sure that the weight was close to even.

I cannot imagine what would happen here and now if that happened.

Look I don’t want my children being mauled or disabled by playground equipment. but I do want them to be able to learn from making mistakes. They need to learn to identify problems or dangers. If we take all dangers away from them, they cannot learn this fundamental skill.

My children used to see more playgrounds in Peppa Pig and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse than they did in real life. So with the youngest I want to keep her out playing as long as the air is clean enough. If she gets hurt, we’ll hug her and she will learn from it. Worse case scenario, she needs a doctor for an injury. but still, she will get support from us, and will learn. She will also get time to play with other kids, and learn social skills that we had to fight hard to expose her older siblings to.

Does this make me a bad parent in the world’s eyes?