Childhood memories/lessons.

I have one, although its not quite so much on the funny side.

I used to have a play room, back when I was pretty little, and there was this wooden slide in miniature, a bit like the ones that you see in play parks. From what I understand, my dad made it for me when he was in a carpentry phase and my mom was pregnant (worked in theater, so he was big on building sets)

Anyhow, from what I remember, it was a normal day, and my dad came in, and I don't remember great details, but I think folks were sad, or that's the impression I get. Lots of hugging all around, and quite a bit of confusion on my part. Then everybody took off, and I resumed sliding down my slide.

Told my mom about it a few years back, because I thought it was weird that it was one of the only really young memories I had, and she said that she remembered that, as it was when my dad moved out, and a tiny bit before they got divorced. Turned out he'd slept with one of his students, and then felt guilty about it and told her earlier that day. She never forgave him for it, and after bumming around in town for a few years, he hit the road when the economy tanked and they started dumping art from the university.

I've got more, some more funny, particularly ones from boy scouts in the early days, but that's the first one that always comes to mind when people ask about old memories. Hard to tell these days whether its a reinforced fakey one that my head's rebuilt, or just something emotional that stuck around on its own.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by ExoXile

Guess I'll be hearing of it until we go under ground.

Man, feeling so slow. Took me a couple of seconds to realize what you meant. Thought you were planning on going all bombshelter on us, a la Fallout or something.

On a lighter one, one of my fonder outdoors memories (even though it kind of sucked at the time) was going on a winter campout with the Boy Scouts, where we were supposed to practice our survival skills. They gave us a tarp and sleeping bags, and nothing else for two days. It was also a really nasty winter and there was a good foot+ of snow on the ground.

Anyhow, the first night wasn't so bad, and working together we got a lean too up and hollowed out a section of ground where we could sleep in a big huddle (manly). The next day we were freezing though, so scavenging around we found a bunch of sticks that were dry under some trees, and after like three hours of all of us trying, one managed to get the old stick friction method to work and a tiny fire going.

Now, an important part is that he had done this in the dead roots of a huge tree that had died and fallen on its side. (Huge to me in memory means several feet wider in diameter than I was tall) Anyhow, this was great, and for the rest of the day we basically just kicked around the fire, playing games, telling stupid stories, and riding out the rest of our sentence until our dads would come back for us and we could go home.

Unfortunately, we were also young and stupid, and two important things resulted because of it. The first, was that in the middle of the night, several people started shivering, and getting woken up because their sleeping bags were getting wet. One of which was me. In my sleepy state, I just thought we were melting the snow with our heat, and tried to move out of the pool. This went on for hours until I started to see light and there was this weird sound, at which point I finally gave up and got up.

What I saw stepping outside of our lean too was that the world was literally on fire about 10' off from us. We had stupidly left our fire going in the roots of the tree, and over six unattended hours it had lit a few of the roots on fire, and then proceeded to take over the entire tree. Nearly the minute I stood up, I almost immediately had to get back down because it was like standing next to a furnace. Luckily for us, the tree had been a bit of a loner, and fallen away from the main woods when it died, so the only real worry was the grass lighting up. Good thing too, as there was a shit lot we could do about it. I started yelling at the rest of the folks, and then we all scrambled around for the next couple hours doing our inexperienced / ineffectual best to dig panicked fire trenches and throw snow on everything.

Needless to say, our folks were pissed / horrified when they showed up, and immediately went to work with shovels and whatever else they could find. Also, we were never left unattended in the woods again. Ever.

There's nowhere I can't reach.