WATERMELON DREAMS: Strange Tales: Childhood’s Passage of Growing up in Pasadena - 6620

After we’d all grown up and moved out of our family home on Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena, my brothers and I would still get together for holidays. With the extended family members all together, we’d invariably talk about all the good and bad things that happened to us growing up in Pasadena and Altadena. I naturally presume that this is what all families do, and that all families have had more or less the same experiences that I have had. Though we would mostly laugh at these memories from 40+ years earlier, I found that the reality of my childhood was not the same as the jovial memory in the retelling. I realized that I always felt out of the loop, on the outside looking in, trying to get into IN of whatever cool or hip group surrounded me. I wondered if everyone always felt out of the loop. Yet, there was always the in-crowd which most students and youngsters admired and looked up to. Did they feel “in,” or did they too aspire to something better. And then there was the dark side of being “in.” Most of the cool group that I worked to befriend were not uplifting and high-aspiring people. Rather, they were drug users, smokers, drinkers, swearers – and yet we looked up to these bad boys. Where were my uplifting peers? I recall running into one of these “bad boys” many years after high school, when I was no longer concerned about anyone’s loop, when being “in” no longer held any sway over me. He was someone I both feared and respected, and once viewed him in a surreal light. Yet, there he was some 15 years later. He seemed frightened of the world, dirty, and he could not look straight into my eyes. His eyes were literally shifty, and he could not speak about things directly. I assumed that past drug use and his own internal fears got the better of him, and rather than fear, I felt only empathy, and remorse for someone who could have been me. This book is about growing up, and trying to stay out of trouble. It is a series of stories about the trouble we got into, and how we viewed the world. In retrospect, I was very much like the two FBI investigators of the popular X Files. We knew something was out there, beyond our reach, but we didn’t feel we would ever get into IN. I lived in a shrouded, cloudy world of fear and conspiracies, and a reality of other people with greater powers and greater influence. I saw myself not so much as an underdog, but rather as someone who was not even a contender. Just out of the loop. This then is my story. It’s by no means complete. Some stories are too personal, or too boring for outsiders. It was also impossible to write a strictly chronological story. I shared how a current event triggered a past memory, for example. And in each of the vignettes that comprise this work I attempted to give a complete narrative, and that narrative went over several years in some cases. So the timeline jumps around. There also has to be at the very least some educational or entertainment component to each story, or you’d never bother reading it. I share what I share because it is always better to shine the Light of the Intelligence into darkness so that there may be light. I share so that others may learn, and not need to repeat my own stupidity, wasted time, and misdirected activities. Also, I share so that you might laugh!
ASIN: B0BJY34Z7C
VSKU: BVV.B0BJY34Z7C.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Nyerges, Christoher
Binding: Paperback