Childhood Memory Monday: Princess Positions

Monday's post, since I was watching a True Blood marathon with a friend and didn't get around to this. I may have to move the TV post day, and I think I will dispense with the current events postings and instead do a favorite vegetarian meal. I am starting to feel the call to vegan a little bit more these days and would like to inspire myself in that area.

As I've mentioned previously, when we lived in Massachussetts we drove down to Florida every year for vacation. This served several purposes: to visit family (we had aunts and uncles on both sides who lived in various parts of the state), to take a vacation (we visited a wide variety of tourist attractions), and to look for a place to live.

My mother's health had begun to decline when we lived in Vermont, and among her ailments were arthritis and bursitis (both of which lead to painful joint inflammation). Her doctor suggested that living someplace warmer would be better for her. I'm a little unclear in retrospect why we had a three-year stopover in Massachussetts, where we lived in my grandfather's house (he was in a nursing home), but live there we did.

When we visited Florida, we drove - a process that took 3 days each way. My dad bought a guide to restaurants and hotels along the Interstate, and made fun math problems to help us determine how far we might drive in a day and, therefore, which hotels we should be looking at in our guidebooks - once this was determined my sister and I were happy to spend the entire day in an endless debate over amenities and whether the hotel name boded well for our stay (was an inn named Sleep luckier than a hotel named Quality or Comfort?). Despite the fact that, given our budget, all the hotels we actually stayed in were generically similar did not deter us from our mission to find the absolute best place. Nor did proximity to a variety of restaurants cease to be one of the primary deciders, when in fact my sister and I refused to eat anything except MacDonald's chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce despite our parents' begging: "doesn't a Whopper sound good? Arby's Roast Beef? A sitdown place? ANYTHING?!"

The hotel arrangements were quite cramped, since we'd get one hotel room with two queen-sized beds - my sister and I sleeping in one bed and my parents in the other. Now, while we did play together quite a bit (being close in age at about 2 years apart), 24 hours a day for a week and a half or two weeks at a time is quite a bit to ask of two children under 10. We professed to hate each other completely, and the awkward thing about the hotel was whether or not we would touch each other in our sleep, this being a fate worse than death. Enter Princess Positions.

Princess Positions were a variety of approved sleeping positions that genteel ladies of good breeding could assume in order to not disturb the sleep of their similarly genteel sleeping companions. I remember there being at least three "approved" Princess Positions (which meant my sister and I both agreed that the position drastically reduced the odds of nocturnal touching) though the most common was flat on your back with your legs together and your fingers intertwined on your chest.

Every night in the hotel, we'd change into pajamas, lay out our clothes for the next day, and lay in bed watching TV as a family for awhile before my parents turned out the lights, at which point either my sister or I would announce "Princess Positions!" and we'd immediately assume our chosen option for the night. After two weeks of this, we were always grateful to return to the relative spaciousness and freedom of our own twin beds!

Childhood Memory Monday: Unicorns

I named this blog The Enchanted Unicorn for several reasons. The first is that it is the name of my favorite slot machine. Once while living in Tucson I started with $20 and ended up with over $200, playing penny slots, no less. Another time in Phoenix I started with something like $100 and ended up with over $600 (4 rows of lions, rawr!) playing nickel slots. The rows are all princes, and princesses, and unicorns, and roses, and the bonus game consists of treasure chests guarded by evil sorcerers. I love it!

But my love of unicorns goes back much farther than that. When I was young, I was completely obsessed with them. When we lived in Vermont (up until I was 5 or so) I wanted to be a unicorn so badly my dad made little paper cones shaped like unicorn horns and taped them to the bright orange hunter's caps he made us wear (we lived in an area so rural there truly was the off chance that we'd be shot in the autumn and winter if we weren't wearing a bright color, and my sister and I loved loved loved our caps - we felt so grown up!). We galloped all over the mountain we lived on, our delightful whinnies filling the crisp fall air.

Later, mostly when we lived in Massachussetts from when I was 6-9 or so, I also had an imaginary unicorn in the way that some children have imaginary friends. Every year that we lived in MA we drove down to Florida (yes, drove, it took 3 days because my dad wouldn't let my mom take a turn driving) and I stared out the window, imagining that my unicorn ran swiftly beside the car. Periodically, I would tell my dad that my unicorn was tired and we needed to pull into a rest area. Typically, that meant that I was bored, stiff from sitting, or had to pee :-)

During our time in Massachussetts, my sister and I also shared an obsession with the animated classic, The Last Unicorn. Every weekend my dad would take us to the video store and ask us what we wanted to rent, and every week it was the same. He tried in vain to get us to widen our selection, but The Last Unicorn on a weekly basis for months at a stretch was not unusual. I remember that my dad cried almost every time...whether from boredom or because it's such a heartbreakingly beautiful film, who can say? I still own both the book the movie was based on and the DVD. Though I think to call Mia Farrow's singing a "voice talent" is overstating things a tad (it also features the "voice talents" of Angela Lansbury and Jeff Bridges).

I read every book that had to do with unicorns that I could get my hands on. This was back in the days when Choose Your Own Adventure books were hot, and of course my favorite one was called The Magic of the Unicorn. Those books must be collector's items now because a new copy on Amazon runs over $75, can you believe it? I also remember a time that we were walking around an open-air flea market and I came across De Historia et Veritate de Unicornis: On The History and Truth of the Unicorn. A brand new copy of this sucker goes for over $160 on Amazon. The book is made up of copies of an illuminated Latin manuscript accompanied by translations and the author's notes - the manuscript being purportedly held in trust by monks and passed on to this worthy author, who begins to walk the boundary between our world and the unicorn's over the course of the translation.

The book ends with the monk entrusting the author with an actual unicorn horn, which is buried in a secret location that can only be revealed by cracking the riddle in poem form that is reprinted on the last page of the book. Of course I immediately committed the poem to memory, convinced that I and I alone was destined to uncover the horn, wield whatever mystical power it commanded, including drawing the few remaining unicorns in our world to me by virtue of its power. I still remember some of it:

and I shall guard the source of greatness
waiting by a teardrop, from neither joy nor sorrow born
in silver bound, beneath the ground
I am the spiral horn

Like my friend Dalyn, who believed in Santa Claus for an obscenely long time, I was CONVINCED that unicorns were real right up until I was in high school. And hey, so far my belief in unicorns has led to a profit of about $700, so who's to say it isn't so?