Ten Things About My Childhood

• When I was five or six I tried digging tro China in our backyard strawberry garden. I dug the hole much wider than it was deep and at that rate I probably would have taken ten lifetimes to reach where I was going.
• My first crush was in Grade Two, I guess I was about six or seven. I wrote a love note for a girl in my class named Shauna and passed it to the boy in front of me to give to her. Instead he read it out loud to the whole class. I almost died.
• When I was seven or eight I ran away from home. I packed a few things and walked North (!) to Hawaii through our local park. I was going to hop on a train but I couldn't figure out which one went there, got hungry and came home. I was gone for about half an hour.
• In Grade Four I had a wicked crush on my teacher for the year. (Her initials were G.G. but with the way she wrote it we used to call her "88".) I stayed late to help her prep for the next day, told her I loved her and she said she loved me back. She handled it so well, I'll always be grateful to her for not breaking my heart.
• When I was about nine I tried to chop down our poplar tree with the back of a claw hammer.
• I went to the ballet on a field trip when I was about ten. Not because I liked the ballet but because I was the only boy on a school bus full of girls. Loved every minute of it.
• My brother and I used to catch snakes in our local field by the railway tracks. When I was about eleven we put some of them in a bucket, covered it and went out for the day. When we returned my mother was furious; they had escaped in the laundry room. She didn't realize it until one of the snakes poked its head out of a sock. I almost didn't make it to my next birthday.
• My friend and I once set a very small fire on the tracks after a train had passed. The train stopped and the conductor (at the end of the train) called us over. I thought we were in serious trouble, but instead of giving us a lecture he showed us around inside the caboose. We never set a fire again.
• I wore braces and headgear in my early teens and hated every minute of it. In total I've had eight teeth removed although luckily you'd never know it.
• I used to sleep over at my best friend's house, and in the summer we use to sneak out of the house late at night and hop through people's backyards. One time we made too much noise and a friend of mine got spotted by the homeowner. We got scared, took off and left him there. (Some friend huh?)