baby got jacked (part deux)

by mg at 08:36 AM on October 26, 2001

I’ve felt safe in my living arrangements for a long time, but finding out my next-door neighbor had her apartment jacked yesterday, well, it just makes me feel unsafe.

It reminds me of my toddler years. When I was younger, we were pretty poor. I lived with my mom, and we didn’t really get much (any) help from my dad. My mom is really smart. She was a pre-med student in college, and had been doing computer programming back when they still used punch cards and COBOL. But, she went through a tough period after I was born. If it weren’t for me, my mom would probably be a senator or the CEO of eBay by now.

I don’t blame myself, though; she was the one stupid enough to get pregnant. Which is how we ended up living in this crappy apartment, in this really crappy neighborhood. I was about three or four at the time, and I don’t remember much about it, or really much of anything from my youth.

I do remember it was a tiny one room apartment. To separate the space and give both us both a little privacy, because who needs privacy more than a three year-old, my mom put up this bookcase in the middle of the room. On one side of the room were my bed, toys, and whatever other junk a three year-old has. On my mother’s side of the barricade was all her adult stuff. I remember my side of the room pretty clearly, yet I can’t remember a single thing from her side, it was just boring adult stuff.

At any rate, the shelving she put up were this really unsteady metal deally that she still was using up until this year. Actually, it was probably in good shape when I was 3, but, before I finally convinced her to get rid of it, 20+ years later, it had become this twisted, jagged and rusty collection of metal bits, more suitable for trapping bears than shelving books.

I bring up the fact it was sturdy back in the day, because one of my most vivid memories of childhood was of climbing those shelves. I’m not sure if other babies climb things, but people often say I must have been a cat in a previous life. That assessment is based as much on my love of climbing random objects (even today) as it is on my hot and cold interest of the world around me, ability to sleep in awkward positions, and constantly licking of myself.

I would climb those shelves on an almost daily basis; whenever I got bored thinking about what letter was going to sponsor Sesame Street tomorrow, or whether my diaper needed changing. A large percentage of my climbing excursions ended with the shelf tipping over and falling on top of me. Which probably explains their poor state today.

I really don’t know what my deal was. Maybe I can understand why, after the first time the bookcase fell over on me I climbed it a second time. But why after the third, fourth, fifteenth time I got buried in Volumes Ha through Ni of our 1972 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica I would have learned something.

But I didn’t learn a thing from my early mountaineering experience.

Unfortunately, that has nothing to do with why I bring up my childhood home. To be continued…