Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Forty-Eight.

I’m still embarrassed by the red flannel cap I wore that Christmas. Do you have anything from your long-ago past that still makes your cheeks sting with chagrin? I don’t know how old I was, maybe ten? But I’d read Little Women and was enamored of the fashions and traditions of the idealized past, and I had started trying to sleep in flannel nightgown and sleeping cap–the kind you would see in Coca-Cola ads depicting sleepy-eyed children and Santa Claus. Nevermind that I lived in California, and a flannel nightgown and cap were not only absurd on their own, but particularly so when “winter” meant cooling to 72 degree December days.

I was a weird kid. Dreamy. Lost in my books. My books were my world, and I wanted to live there. So sometimes I tried. I wish it had stopped with that ridiculous lace-trimmed flannel cap, but it didn’t. I tried to make a corset from wire-hangers and duct tape after I read Gone with the Wind. I tried to dry plums in the sun on top of the chicken coop after I found Steinbeck. I imagined myself Fern, lecturing my father and his friends on the morality of killing a pig to eat.

So that Christmas, in my red flannel while the rest of my family was comfortable in shorts, I opened the last big package. It was a pair of roller skates. They were beautiful white leather with smooth nylon wheels that whispered on hidden ball-bearings, and giant purple pom-poms covered the un-marred toes. I gazed into the box, so happy, imagining myself gliding over the fresh patio my dad had poured in the backyard.

Then I remembered the stupid hat, and tore it off. One couldn’t wear a Victorian sleeping cap and possess the finest roller-skates on the west coast. Worlds collided, and modernity won.

I was a weird kid. But I roller skated the wheels off of those suckers, and I’ve never worn a sleeping cap again.