One time my sister poured lime koolaid over my head from her baptismal cup. Then she got sent to her room, where she proceeded to write me a hate letter in braille. I was maybe 4 and she would have been 8.

For awhile when I was 9 or so, I pretended I was Heidi. I would wear one of three petticoat type dresses I had everyday, and eat only cheese, a big bowl of warm milk, and crusty bread. I am sure that I was forced to eat other foods, but I can't remember.

typewriter, did you put cinnamon and sugar in the milk like I did? cause that's how she described the goat milk. Sweet and spicy or some such.

When I was eight, I joined Little League. they assigned me to a team and we broke off into little meetings with our coaches, who told us that if we wanted to be catcher, we had to get a special piece of equipment. I wanted to be catcher.

A few minutes later as I was getting ready to leave I spied my Dad sitting on the little alumminum stands on the other side of the park, so I yelled "Daaad! I need to get a protective cup!" which the assembled seemed to find amusing.

I still don't think Dad's forgiven me.

One time when my dad took me to the pub with him he got so drunk he forgot about me and left me in the TV room. The landlord found me when they were closing up. So they drove me home.

In the meantime, after my dad came home by himself, my mum sent him back to fetch me. He got to the pub to find it all closed up. When he got home and I was there, I get a good hiding because somehow it was all my fault.

I accidentally (despite all parental warnings about doing so) barefoot-stepped on a nail that was poking out of a 2x4 that we kids used to cross a shallow bayou in my childhood neighborhood here in Houston. Said nail punctured my foot clear through. When a friend's mom, who was a nurse and whose house was closer to where the incident occurred than my own, removed the nail and associated 2x4 from my foot, I projectile vomited all over her, her son, and the just spit-shined-Sunday-going-to-church shoes she'd just polished and set out on the table top.

I was never invited to play with her kids again.

I was horribly jealous of my younger sister, and endeavored aggressively to kill or disfigure her. One of the more charming stories though involves the time my mother found us in the nursery, and I had poured an entire bottle of perfume over my sister's head, and was in the process of covering her face in lipstick. I told our mother that my infant sister had asked me "to make her pretty". I wasn't allowed to nap in the nursery anymore after that.

When I was around 7 or so, my older sister and I would play the recorder or sing into a tape recorder. She discovered that I had perfect pitch, which I thought everybody had. She then assumed that she was just stupid about music, which made me shout in triumph because she always made me feel stupid about everything else.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was about 6 or 7, and I was eating breakfast cereal. I created a scenario in my mind: I was not a human, but rather a huge mechanical thing made to look like a human. I was a huge sign, a moving, mechanical sign, a billboard advertising breakfast cereal. The huge mecahnical arm (my arm) was holding a huge spoon, and would move (mechanically, of course) from the bowl to my mouth. The thing is, actual people were somehow always falling into the huge bowl, and the huge mechanical me was eating them. Every bite of cereal I took was, therefore, a big spoonful of unlucky people who had somehow fallen into the bowl.

I guess I was a strange child, i dunno. Maybe I'd just read too many comic books or something...

My name is Tim, and for Thanksgiving our fourth grade teacher taught each of her classes a song called Timothy Turkey. (This was back in the days when virtually every elementary school teacher could play piano.) Well, this was no big deal for me until my brother reached fourth grade and he came home one day singing Timothy Turkey, which my younger brother and my sister picked up on. From then on, my family nickname was Turkey, although my mother shortened it to Turk. That was the last thing she called me over the phone before she died, "Turk? Is that you?"

Once when I was maybe 8 or 9, I was at a bookstore with my mom. We were just checking out (she was buying me 2 new Nancy Drew books, a HUGE treat. Our library didn't carry the books). It started to rain really hard. My mom said we'd wait in the store until it eased up. So I went back to the Nancy Drew section, picked up one of the books I'd chosen against, with great difficulty, and started reading. I got through about half the book when my mom came to get me. She let me stay and finish it. I have a really great mom.

When I was 3 or 4. One of my earliest memories. . .my uncle (who later died of alcoholism-related stuff) was taking my sister and me to a local breakwater, climbing around the rocks (which I later did a lot of during my childhood).

I slipped and went into the water, and apparently it was awhile before my uncle noticed. It was an overcast day and I remember the pale green water, bubbles, as I went up and down. I remember telling them that don't bother saving me, I was a goner (or some such thing). Finally my uncle grabbed my arm and pulled me out, shivering and coughing and crying.

I remember my mom being VERY upset and I assumed she was mad at ME for falling in the water.

(I turned out to be a really good swimmer.)

When I was about five, my older brother and I got into a conversation about whether or not, if I stuck a pin into this ball I had, it would deflate. I totally believed it would deflate, but my brother swore it wouldn't.

You can see this coming... I stuck a pin in it and it deflated. And I cried and I cried...

Since my feet were pigeon toed, the doc suggested I be enrolled in dance class. Being a tomboy, I didn’t find ballet so much fun – but acrobatics was lovely! So I persuaded my Mom to allow me to do only acrobatics. This was way before Olympics were such a big thing on the teevee and I knew nothing about parallel bars or such. My stunts were much more circus type: place each foot on a chair and slowly push them apart until doing a full split hovering in midair, then rotate into handstand; go into backbend and walk up stair to a landing then bend backwards all the way to the floor and pick up cup of water w/ teeth and drink on the way up; walk up said stair contraption on hands; Do full split at doorframe. All were tricks that relied on flexibility and muscle control so they were quite fun little stunts to do.

Recitals were nerve-wracking because I was so shy. The worst time was when my instructor came on stage just as my routine was finished and told the audience that I had recently learned to walk on my hands and was going to demonstrate. Talk about scared: I only had it down 50% of the time. For some reason the sky was smiling at me and I managed to walk the whole length of the stage without messing up. If I could only translate that to the rest of my life!

When my mother was reviewing an offer to buy our house when I was almost 7, I was playing follow-the-leader in the yard with my sister and friends. My best friend was the leader, and I was following too closely and she kicked me in the face while wearing tap shoes. Split my cheekbone and scraped my eyebrow. My face was covered in blood and my sister ran into the living room, telling "Mom! Betsy kicked Lizzy in the eye with a tap shoe!" My mother was really worried about looking, but as it turned out, I was fine.

Stewerric: why braille?

Stewriffic: Re: sweetened Heidi milk
Actually, more often than not, it was heated soy milk for 2 reasons.
1) My mother was probably worried about the nutritional deficiencies of being Heidi.
2) Cultural. We already often drank heated soy milk for breakfast.

My younger brother, some friends and I were playing "Islands" in our family room. Islands consisted of us jumping from one piece of furniture to another without touching the floor and without moving the furniture.

I ended up jumping to a piece of furniture that my younger brother hadn't yet vacated. He got pushed through a window. Blood went everywhere, of course. He was rushed to rushed to a hospital and stitched up.

Although all of us were playing, it was me who got into trouble even though it wasn't on purpose. I still get shit for it to this day.

When Bro was married to his first wife, it came out that he told her that the scar on his side was from a knife fight and the one on his wrist was from when he tried to commit suicide. She gave him shit for that, which he rightly deserved.

"rushed to rushed to"? Oy vey.

More Heidi:

I saw an old Heidi movie when I was about six. It was black and white, foreign, and overdubbed into English. As a result, I tried to "talk like Heidi" - meaning my lips didn't move to match my words. "WHY ARE YOU TALKING LIKE THAT?" My mother asked. "I'm talking like Heidi," I said, with a contorted mouth. This lasted about a week. I'm sure my mother, not knowing the background, had grave concerns.

Beans on the ceiling.

mudpuppie - I got called into the principals office for beans on the ceiling in second grade. I wept my eyes out. I was put up to it.

If that's what you mean.

I was eight and my parents took me to meet who I thought was the Fonz. He turned out to be older Henry Winkler and didn't look or sound anything like the Fonz at all. I wasn't really bothered by it.

The same year, they took me to meet Davy Jones. I had been watching Monkees' reruns and buying their records and I was shocked to see Davy old with frosty blonde hair and over-tanned skin. I cried.

When I was nine or ten I was out climbing on these rocks overlooking Long Island Sound - we lived in Connecticut then - and I climbed much higher than I usually ever did. This was unexplored territory for me and it was cool. Then I suddenly realized that there was a wall at the top of the cliff I was climbing, which meant that I couldn't get all the way up and that I wasn't entirely sure how to get down. I thought, wow, it will be hours and hours before my mother even begins to look for me and I could die if I fall here. Then, just at that moment, my St. Christopher medal fell off my neck; the chain it was on just broke and I watched it fall into the rocks and surf underneath me. I was completely positive I was going to die at that minute and I waited for it. Eventually waiting for death got dull, though, and I managed to climb down just fine and found my way home with no problem.

I never told anyone about this adventure - I'm not sure that my parents ever had any idea that I spent most of my summer days climbing and exploring and canoeing and sailing by myself and, this is weird, I know, sneaking into people's houses just to explore. Nobody ever really seemed to care where I was or come looking for me as long as I was home for dinner. I always felt bad about losing St. Christopher though; he was my favorite saint, still is. My mother had told me he wasn't a saint anymore and for some reason that made me all fiercely protective of him; I felt like he'd been horribly wronged.

Oh and re: Heidi - did anyone else find goats milk terribly, terribly disappointing, not to say gross, when they finally tried it expecting Heidi's wonderful favorite food?

Eventually waiting for death got dull, though

That is the best thing I have read all week!

re: goat's milk - yes. Baaaad. I've since been told that the right way to milk them is before they eat, and to plunge the containers of milk into an ice bath immediately. I've never been around to taste that kind of milk, so I dunno.


I had a childless Aunt who got us the cool presnts and took the cool pics. In 1976 we did all of Grandma's backyard in red white and blue. I planted a flag flowerbed, and painted the picnic table as a flag, too.

There is probably still in the archives, Super-8 film of me holding up a sign I was so proud of making, saying "WET PANT".

We moved to London from the states for a year when I was seven. It was fantastic, but the hardest part was being away from my grandparents, who (until then) I had spent nearly every weekend and holiday with.

So for Christmas, after four or five long months of not seeing my grandparents (or my dog!), my grandma and my Aunt Dotty come to visit. My parents got us up early to drive to Heathrow to pick them up. I had been nervous and excited all morning and didn't want to eat anything, but my mom had insisted I have at least a little something for breakfast. When we got to the airport, we were a little late meeting the plane, so we literally had to run to the gate... whereupon in my giddiness and haste I vomited all over a woman in a mink coat. And then I just kept running.

When I was about 8, I decided to write a book, about treasure hunting in Egypt. The cover page featured all sorts of handsome drawings of horses and one of the heroine (me) wielding a whip at a threatening snake (this was years before Indiana Jones, btw-- I'm not sure where I picked up on these cliches), as well as an Egyptian style cat head figurine. I proudly showed it to my Mom, who then nearly had a fit trying to be encouraging and maternal while simultaneously threatening to break into hysterical laughter. In grand, curlicued letters, I'd written the title: "Behind The Eyes of The Idle".

As a kid I was a living physics demonstration -- picking up momentum of all kinds and eventually taking it over curbs or into walls or onto blacktop -- just a repository of potential energy. This usually caused pain and bruises and skinned knees; only while sledding or rolling down a hill was my great gravity an advantage. I had a hand-me-down down jacket with a broad back of slippery nylon; on slick snow, I could pull it tight across my back and slide down a hill on my back like a turtle. It's great fun to careen blindly down a hill, but you will end up in the bushes as often as not. Since I'm highly allergic to poison ivy, I got itchy rashes playing in deep snow more than once. My midwinter poison ivy always puzzled my folks.

When I was maybe 6 or 7, I ran around a corner of the house and came face to face with a bumblebee. I swore that it was 6 inches in diameter. I believed this, in an unexamined way, for many years.

Eek, mygothlaundry, I had that exact same thing happen once on a small cliffside in California (minus St. Christopher). I credit the experience for my lasting fear of heights. Also I'm glad to not be the only one who remembers the weird description of goats' milk from Heidi.

In March or so of my second grade year, my parents were arranging a family trip overseas. This was going to cause my sister and I to miss about three weeks of class during finals. The principal of the lower school, a wonderful woman but somewhat tanklike and therefore intimidating, sent for me one day, hoping to impress upon my seven-year-old self that this was a Very Big Exception they were making. I had a vague idea that she was omniscient. I also had a pocketful of disgusting purple dinosaur-shaped vitamins which I had been storing in my desk, and had removed with the idea of either consuming them or burying them in the school garden during recess, to help the plants. On my walk to the office, I was suddenly struck by the thought that she would know I hadn't been taking my vitamins. I tried swallowing them whole, but they wouldn't go down, so I stuffed them all in my mouth and chewed. The next fifteen minutes or so were an eternity as I tried to answer serious questions about personal responsibility and hard work through an enormous mouthful of sickly sweet purple goo that got more difficult to get down by the second. To her great credit, she pretended not to notice that there was anything unusual in my pantomiming the entire conversation.

I was friends with a boy called Drew - who was my best friend, and whom I used to play with all the time. Everyone used to say we were going out, but we weren't. Though he did tell me about all the girls who had a crush on him at the time. Oh - I was in grade 1 or 2 at this time.

One day I went up to him - we were exploring the firestation in town on a tour at the time - and I jumped up on him, and he yelled at me. I never really talked to him much again after that - we were certainly no longer BFFs.

One day the next year, I was off sick from school, and Drew and his older brother Jonathan - who both went to a different school and had the day off - were playing at my house. We wrote in biro on the cubby house, and I distinctly remember Jonathan coming up to me very seriously at one point, and telling me he was in love with me. I remember being distinctly gracious, and saying "thanks so much for telling me", without telling him I loved him back - which I did not. That was the first time anyone had declared their love for me.

I was at Lake Sammamish State Park the same day Ted Bundy kidnapped and murdered that woman. I might well have seen them but I don't remember.

I was in mountains around Grand Junction when he escaped from jail.

Once, my mom was cleaning our bathroom. I was probably 12 or so. She discovered a piece of gum in the bottom of our bathroom garbage can. She said, "Is this gum? Well that's just ducky!"

My mother and I went to Las Vegas when I was 16 or 17, and we rode the elevator up that big tower that's supposed to be like the Stratosphere. At the top, the walls are all glass and the floor slopes away into the glass walls and there's a bar way out over the glass to lean on. Anyway, I was leaning out a bit over the glass looking down at the strip below and my mom pushed me. It felt like I was going to fall all the way down, but of course I just fell onto the bar. But honestly, my body couldn't tell the difference between the glass and a free-fall.

The lilac tree.

It's not so brief.

These are great - thanks!

My parents were given a handmade coffee table as a wedding present - it's very well done with a lovely tiled top in different shades of brown (they were married in 1975). When my sister and I were very young and it was bathtime we would hide under the coffee table (playing a game with my dad, who was a bit of a wuss where discipline and his precious baby girls were concerned) and draw on its underside until my dad pretended to give up and find us. My mum still has this coffee table and the scribblings from our reluctance to be clean are hilarious.

I was around 11 or so, waiting after Girl Scouts for my mom to pick me up. We were all hanging around the parking lot, as they closed the church room where we had our meetings. We all decided to play "Red Rover". Unfortunately, I was shorter than most of the other girls (story of my life), so when it was time for "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Vixen over" and I tried to break through their arms, they caught me under my chin. My body kept going, though, so my feet went up, and I crashed down, hitting my head, and actually knocking myself out for a couple of seconds. When I came to, everyone was in a circle standing over me, with our Girl Scout leader looking panicked. My only concern was my glasses, which had flown off my face but were caught by a friend of mine. I had a knot on the back of my head the size of an egg.

Well, there was this time that I decided to fill up the water bottle for my mom. This was a standard jug-wine bottle of some heft, used for watering indoor plants. I must have been in the third grade or lower because of the house this was in.

Anyway, I put it in the sink, and realized that instead of tipping it at about 10 degrees to get the water in, I could force it directly under the faucet, where it would get the full stream of water without my holding the heavy thing up. It filled and filled.

And filled.

And then it was full, and the glass bottle burst open. My hand, I think, was still clutching the neck. There were shards of glass everywhere in the sink and on the kitchen floor. I was completely unhurt, fortunately.

I was not quite 4 years old and one of my myriad uncles picked me up and swung me around. When he stopped I puked in his shirt pocket. About a week later I whacked his big toe with a wooden mallet. I'm not sure if those two things are related.

Oddly enough that is about the only memory I have before age 6 and one of the few memories that uncle has of me as he sinks into dementia.

"That was the last thing she called me over the phone before she died, "Turk? Is that you?" I really hope that makes you as happy as it makes me Ardiril.

She said, "Is this gum? Well that's just ducky!"

Oh, how I love this expression! I really need to use it more.

When I was about four, we lived in a big apartment building. One day I was very excited for my father to get home from school for some reason. When I saw his silhouette coming down the building hallway I bolted out of the apartment and hugged him around the legs.

Except it was the mailman.

I don't think my embarrassed claim that I was just running out "to hug the wall" was very credible.