Quotes About Memories

You know, when I was a young boy I used to play baseball in my back yard or in the street with my brothers or the neighborhood kids. We used broken bats and plastic golf balls and played for hours and hours.

I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.

My earliest memories are of watching 'Star Trek' and 'MASH' while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.

Sometimes I think I am still that 5-year-old girl playing with her dogs in the yard. That's how I see myself.

Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour.

I vaguely remember we had an air-raid shelter in our yard. We lived in a semi-detached house with a small garden in the suburbs of Salford, a couple of miles from the docks.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour. It's about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.

Most of my memories are of softball games in Falls Church with my sister, yard sales across town on the weekends with my grandma, grocery-shopping and errand-running with my mom, learning to drive an old Volkswagen bug down Old Keene Mill Road with my dad.

I had a very nice life. I was a very good kid. I had nice friends. I played in the school yard. I was nice to my parents; they were nice to me. They were loving parents - they were always there.

I was always impressed by how much my dad went out in the yard and played with me and my siblings when we were kids. I'm sure he was tired coming back from work, since he traveled a lot. But he always took time out of his day to go out in the yard.

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.

Super Bowl V was the Colts against the Cowboys and Jim O'Brien kicked a 32 yard field goal to beat the Cowboys. I was traumatized by it. Everyone at school knew I was the only Cowboy fan in the area. I didn't want to go to school and I begged and pleaded with my parents. Those are indelible memories when you are a kid.

When I was eight or nine, we had a goal in the back yard of our council flat. We used to flip it over the back fence and take it out onto the estate. Everyone would come out and we'd play for hours, there were cars screeching to a halt when the ball went on the road.

I grew up on a street that's similar to the ones you used to see in Coronation Street on TV. We had an outside toilet at the bottom of the yard and I had to share a bedroom until my older sisters left home.

I am going to miss Don Shula. I like him, and I admire him. I'm going to miss looking those 53 yards across the field and thinking, 'There is a coaching legend.'

I look at stuff like the 'The Whole 19 Yards' and it reminds me of my childhood watching shows with Mike Reid and kids climbing over obstacles.

My dad loved to 'arrange things' to take us kids to that scared the crap out of us on Halloween. He'd take us to the old 'Hermit's House' at the edge of town. He'd park the car 100 yards down the street and say, 'Go back there and get something off the front porch!'

I'm a huge fan of Canadian rock-and-roll. When I was growing up, Rush came out with a record called Hemispheres, and I must have listened to that record for two years straight. Even when I was asleep I had it on. So, yeah, whenever I hear a Rush tune, the first thing I think of is Toronto.

I did a movie called 'Quicksand No Escape' with Donald Sutherland and Tim Matheson. I think I was maybe 5. I was really little. Yeah, it was fun. And actually, Felicity Huffman played my mom.

For a long time, I thought when you do a box set, you're giving up; you're saying, 'OK, I don't have anything left.' But now I've listened to some of the old stuff I haven't heard in 20 to 40 years with fresh ears. It's like, 'Oh yeah, I can see where people might want to to hear some of this stuff that didn't make it onto the records.'

I burned down my backyard as a seven-year-old. I poured kerosene over dried leaves and set the whole place on fire, just for fun. Yeah, not a very normal thing to do.

Yeah, I shoot. I shot with my dad a little bit when I was little. He was a Marine, so it wasn't like he would take me to the ballet. We would go to a shooting range. It was the only thing he knew to teach his little girl how to do.