Hokay... Where to start?

Right. This may seem extremely crude to you (innocent) readers and scribblers and scribes, BUT, you must attempt to picture what I'm about to tell you with the eyes of a young child.

I was very young - maybe about three or four years old and I was out shopping with my Mom. We were on our merry way homewards when we happened to walk past two small dogs that were, well, making love.

I noticed this with the curiosity only small children possess and I was confused, what were they doing?

I looked up at Mom and I asked her, as I was at that stage when everything needed explaining.

Mom was already exasperated at carrying the shopping, she paused then said;

'They're practising horse riding'.

I remember thinking to myself;

"Oh, of course". Or something similar.

I was totally overcome with the notion that dogs have to train to ride horses, and this event stayed with me through my life. Of course I know now......

I used to put my hand over one eye , and tell my mother I could see through my hand, because as a child that's how it seemed so. I grew older and my mother finally told. She said "Sydney, my dear, your other eye is open too, and that is what you're seeing through."

I didn't believe her for the longest time cause I thought it would still work with the other eye closed, so I tried to experiment, and found it didn't work .

It was completely mysterious to me, how I could barely lay my head on the pillow, not even remember closing my eyes and then it was instantly morning. It seemed no time had passed at all! Was Night Time different than Day Time?

As I now rarely sleep so soundly through the night, it would still seem very magical!

Droplets of water falling from the infinite sky.

Sometimes frozen and snowy, other times wet and bending.

It just seemed so magical that water fell from the sky considering it was so normal to me for water to be on the ground like oceans, lakes, and pools. It was especially strange when it was sunny and it rained.

Around the beginning of my Eighth grade school year, I made a friend I still have to this day. We were servicemen together in different branches but always the buddies learning to grow up together. He was my first bilingual friend, and I had a very serious question for him since I had no idea how to speak anything other than American English. I asked him how can a man and woman understand one another if there is a masculine and feminine form for most words? He simply blinked at me for a moment, knowing now it was in complete astonishment, and he then laughed and said,"It just works that way." Now, after having taken Spanish, French, Japanese, and Greek language classes, I understand that there are multiple forms of some words to more accurately describe things in that tongue. Sadly, It took many years to realise this, and I still become a little rouge in the cheeks if it comes up in general conversation.

When I was small I would place a small sealed envelope with my tooth inside under my pillow and come morning would be money in replace of the tooth. Clever as I was back then I thought the tooth fairy obviously gave me a new envelope with the money inside. So I began to draw pictures and write messages on the outside of the envelope prior to sealing. And yet in the morning was still money instead of a tooth inside that envelope. Oh the power of steam to make magic seem like a reality.