missing Saturday mornings

Video Hits (Australian TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was younger, during the earlier years of high school, Saturday mornings had a sort of comforting ritual to them. I could sleep in to around 9-9:30am, then get up, make some breakfast of my choice (usually toast) and watch Video Hits. I would lose myself in the land of music until noon, making lists of new songs to add to my collection and reminiscing with old favourites.

Then I got to the age where employment becomes a necessity, and suddenly I was working weekends, a slave to endless line of consumers craving salty hangover fixes. And my Saturday morning routine kind of disappeared.

Even cutting down my work shifts didn’t help, since that was when I hit the serious end of school and all of a sudden everything became about when I would study.

Then, finally, school ended, Saturdays returned – but now Video Hits was taken off the air, and even Rage wasn’t playing for long in the mornings.

I just miss the comfort of those days, where I could forget all about my life for a while and lose myself in music, blankets and feelings of contentment. Even during the tougher times of my teenage life, it was a small safe haven once a week.

I long for that. I crave that safety and contentment; the feeling that for a few hours, everything might be alright.

Saturday mornings meant hope and the freedom of a whole weekend to do as I pleased.

I want to reclaim that. But you can’t go back, so I guess I’ll have to find a new way to experience it.

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waxing nostalgic

Everyone is cute when they’re little. There’s something about being so young and full of life that lends itself to genuinely adorable impressions. No fears yet, no social constraints. You just let your imagination roam free as you learn and explore the world around you each day.

The memories of this stage fade over time, but occasionally you can recapture them looking at old photos of yourself from this time. This is what I have been doing – looking over old photos and remembering that magical time. I didn’t have the idyllic childhood, but it wasn’t terrible either. It had its upsets, but somehow despite the absence and occasional reappearance of my father, it remains magical to me.

I grew up in 3 different houses in the same suburb, all within walking distance from the beach.  Naturally, we spent a lot of our time there. We used to walk along the bushland (a very narrow strip of it that exists there), and to me it was one huge fairy dell. All the adults around me joined in with my belief that if we walked quietly and carefully, we could hear the fairies talking, singing and dancing. I genuinely believed this for many years, and even now I can’t help but wonder as I wind my way through.

I also have memories of playing in the backyard of the house we moved to after my parents divorce, as my mum weeded and pruned her stresses away. I was constantly exploring the trees and climbing up one, until I could sit on the brick fence and imagine the lives of the neighbours living around us. I really miss this feeling of wonder at everything – I was genuinely curious about how other people lived, and everything was coated in a veneer of magic and mystery.

Now all I have are these old pictures to remind me of this feeling (and of course how I was once cute). On days like this, I like to curl up with my teddy bear and Billy Joel’s “These are the Times to Remember”  (the song I graduated high school to, which is perfect for nostalgia) as I reminisce about flying on the swings at my kindergarten playground or planting trees at a local park with my sister’s Girl Guides unit (pictured below).This photo is actually kind of an important one – it was very soon after my dad left us, and as my mum tells me, was kind of the first activity the my sister, her and I did as our own little family unit.

Although it’s not very healthy to dwell on the past and forget to live (as Dumbledore wisely advised Harry), at times it is necessary to pause and remember where you’ve been, and how far you’ve come in life.