Childhood Memory
A young man told me a story once about one incident in his childhood in Rize (Turkey). He was ten or eleven years old. He was playing on his front yard, flying a kite by himself when a dark-haired man walked up to him and asked, ‘Can I play too? Can I play with you?’ The young man told me he was scared and didn’t know how to respond. The dark-haired man was only about twenty. He blurted out, ‘You live in a nice home. You don’t have to work. You are lucky. I envy you. I envy your life. Why is my life so hard?’ and he cried and cried. The young man told me that he ran into his house.
The conversation topic was on childhood. One thing I love about teaching English as a foreign language is hearing sudden stories spill, spill, spill (for that young man was only a beginner in English). I asked him to talk about his earliest childhood memory and he said he couldn’t ever forget that.
