Not long for this world

When I was growing up in New Zealand, my older brother was my nemesis. We’re 18 months apart, and actually get along really well now. J used to great pleasure in beating me up, and I took great pleasure in trying to avoid daily beatings.

I had some very good friends when I was younger, all girls which apparently was of some concern to my father, but not so much the various psychologists he consulted. Anyway. stayovers were always a treat.

I had an extensive collection of stuffed animals; I still have most of them now! There’s Koala Bear, Gregory – Koala Bears’ best friend, Yellow (a yellow bear), Dumpty Doo, and a whole bunch of others. Thinking back in their names right now, I see that I veered from the very creative “Dumpty Doo” to the banal “Yellow”, who is, in fact, yellow.

I remember staying over at my friend, Jodi Ann Parker’s house. They had this huge dog; well, huge to a 6 year old, called Dfa. “D for dog” was his full name, but we all called him Dfa. I guess I also had friends who were either lazy, needing help remembering that it was a dog and not a cat, or, really cutely creative. You be the judge.

The house where we lived at the time in Khandallah was called Minihaha. Named after the Indian princess. How a house in New Zealand built in the early half of last century was named after an American Indian princess is strange and a mystery I never looked into, but there you go.

My brother J and I finally had separate rooms at Minihaha, having shared a rooms since we were tiny. Mine private room being called the “old kitchen”. It was actually the old kitchen. It had a pantry, which you could access by rolling up a panel in the wall. This made the room rather cold during the New Zealand winter, and just as cold during the week of the New Zealand summer.

Anyway, I digress. I returned to Minihaha from my sleep over to find every soft toy I owned gently swinging by their necks from rope nooses all fixed to the ceiling of the old kitchen. Apparently as I had not been around for my brother to pound on, he’d taken to lynching all of my precious soft toy friends. A mass hanging is not something an under 10 year old reacts to well.