Week 10: Unexplained Memories

This week’s (Week 10) prompt is Unexplained Memories

Do you have an unexplained memory or memories?
Items
Places
People

Things and times you can remember, but you are not sure where they fit into your past.

Here are a couple memories I can remember, there may be more, but I can’t remember them.

1.        As a small child, I can remember when playing outside and an airplane flew over, that I would get scared and run and hide.  Most of the time  I could make it up onto the porch, or even all the way into the house, but when I couldn’t, I had to find alternate hiding places.  I’d hide under trees or in the bushes, anywhere to be safe from the airplanes.  Why was I so afraid?

It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I think I figured out why.  I was born a couple of years after the end of WWII.  While my father served in the Army during the war, since I wasn’t born yet, it wasn’t a fear of the war itself.  But a good possibility is that when I was very young I heard my parents and other grown-ups talking about the war.  And probably during the course of the conversation, airplanes, bombs and what-not were also discussed.   Fortunately I did outgrow this fear, and don’t remember ever running and hiding after we moved to Portland when I was 7.

2.       I have confusion over my grandfather’s death.  Let me explain further.

Up until I was 7 years old, we lived in La Grande, Oregon.  My parents separated at this time, and my mother, brother & I came to the Portland area then.  I finished out my 2^nd grade year at West Gresham Elementary school, and when school was out, we moved out to Boring (yes, there really is a town called Boring) to live with my grandparents.  This would have been the summer of 1955.  Yet my grandfather died in June 1954.  For years I thought the death date I had been given for him was not right, but recently I got his obituary—not just a transcribed one but the digital image of the real deal—and that date is correct.  Since we used to spend summers with the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, apparently I have confused living there while he was still alive, to a summer visit, probably just before he died.  Unfortunately anyone who could clear that up for me has since passed on, and I didn’t think to ask my mother while she was still living.  

So if possible, as about those unexplained memories while you have the chance!