CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

I just remembered some weird growing up stuff. When I was still a kid, my dad used to warn us of the couch. He frowned upon finding any of us on the chair while watching TV. We would cluster around the television like moths around an open flame while my parents would sit on the chairs above us like a king and queen before their supplicant subjects.

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_{Unsplash: Bill Wegener}

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We also never used the dining table to eat not even my parents. The dining table was meant for three things only; for father when he wanted to repair the ring boiler or the electric cooker, for us when we had to do homework and for us when we fall sick. When you fall sick in my house then, you ate, slept, took pills under the watchful eyes of mother. We learnt how to hide capsules under our tongues in order to beat the security detail at the dining table. Father ate in front of the TV.

We ate on the floor, all of us kids. We would have a big bowl of eba and another bowl of soup with several pieces of meat. Everybody's eyes would be on those pieces of meat and the fights we had over those strips of meat were legendary. We hated the fact that my elder sister shared the meat and chose first. We tried a democracy where the baby shared the meat and the eldest chose first. When we shared, we learnt how to arrange the meat in such a way that a small piece would hide more flesh and as such, we would get a bigger piece than our elder siblings. We would hide the meat on the corner of our mouth, between our teeth and cheek and suck on the juice while we thanked our parents and elders after eating, then we would go back to our room and in there, we would eat that meat one strip at a time. If mother caught on though, we were dead.

We used to pretend to be ninjas just to go to the kitchen and pick chopped onions from the chopping board while mother was cooking. Not that she cared. She encouraged us to eat raw onions, saying it was good for the eyes. One time, she gave me bread, raw onions, raw tomatoes and boiled eggs to school. By lunch time, my desk stank like someone had farted but I ate it anyways. I threw the tomatoes away though.

Father had a rule. Once it was ten pm, we all had to go to bed whether it was a school night or not. So the NTA news ending was our curfew but we didn't go to bed. We would wait until we hear the sound of either Universal or Fox or MGM beginning a movie before creeping out on hands and knees to hide under the couches. Between dust and cobwebs, we watched movies like universal soldier, terminator, species, and all those movies that built our fantasies as kids. Sometimes mother caught on but she would pretend like she didn't see. Sometimes, she would invite us over despite father's protests.

Well we grow older and soon we were using the couches. We could sit on the chairs and watch the TV. Father would call the boys to watch the news with him while mom and the girls cooked and gossiped in the kitchen. I hated the news. I'd rather read a novel or see a movie but father wanted all of us to love football and evening news. Father didn't like us lying on the couches either. He would ask if we had waist problems and tell us to sit up straight. At least we were sitting on chairs. How time flies eh?

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©warpedpoetic, 2019.