by vulcanjedi

Created on: March 26, 2009

Mark!

Stop running. Watch out for those steps. Don't go near that bar.

I reluctantly slowed down and headed back towards the monkey bars where all the other kids were gathered. Big Mark on the other hand went running down the hill, jumped over the steps and started doing flips on the bar. Nobody ever told big Mark what to do. Big Mark was 8 years old and I was only 4. I remembered my grandmother showing me a book about numbers and I knew big Mark was two times older than I was so he was a growed up kid. That was why I thought big Mark never got in trouble for anything he did. Even when he was flying through the air around the playground nobody noticed him.

You have probably figured out by the last line that "Big Mark" was my imaginary friend. Actually he was my imaginary big brother and I was "Little Mark". I have full memory of when I was 4 years old and in nursery school and being out at recess. I can vividly recall how I played and what I did and where I did it. And on the opposite end I can recall the teachers telling me what not to do.

What makes these memories different from what other people have told me is I can recall some things I was thinking. These recollections did not start coming back to me till I was in my 40's. I knew my family slides showed hundreds of pictures from when I was a kid. Because of that memories of places would be no big deal because I had visual references. We had a slide projector and my father loved looking at his slide shows and we did it at family gatherings. On my 44th birthday my father handed me a box of 1600 35mm slides. Over the next 4 months I digitized them all, one by one I was able to go back in time. Memories came flooding back in flashbacks as I saw the slides for the first time in 25 years.

Born in September 1961 I would have been 3 in 1964 when I started my first of two years at nursery school. My best memories coming back from the slides were all the ones from the worlds fair in May 1965. I can remember sitting in a moving thing where sound was coming from behind my head as they were explaining what we were seeing. There were the cities of the future that were going to be on the moon and under water. Those cities were different from the places where the cowboys lived. At that moment my favorite thing switched from cowboys to astronauts. And outside were all those big dinosaurs and I had to have two favorite things because I couldn't decide between astronauts and dinosaurs.

My mother worked at the nursery school as

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