This week, we’re rather buried with development work, so I thought I would let you–our dear readers!–do the blogging for me. 
So, here’s what I ask: tell us a brief story from your life when you were Lila’s age, 11 years old. What worlds of wonder did you create and explore as a child? Could be a place, a feeling, an adventure–tell us about it!
You get extra points if your story sounds like something Lila would experience. Hey, if it’s really good, we’ll put it (or some part of it) into the game with your permission. Wouldn’t that be cool?
From my own childhood, I remember a couple of friends and I would play in some huge crop fields in the late autumn (after harvest, I guess). My memory is of when there were no plants, so it looked like a vast, barren kingdom begging to be explored. What dangers lurked out there in these abandoned plains?
We marched around with our walking sticks and wooden swords armed, our handkerchiefs tied up and filled with supplies (the usual peanut butter sandwich and some kind of fruit drink). The cool thing about these fields was the little crystal rocks we’d always find in them: shiny gems and magical pebbles sprinkled around waiting for us.
What strikes me now is that even in my memory of the place, I never noticed the roads and houses surrounding the fields. We literally went to a different world.
How about you?
34 comments ↓
What an excellent idea! Now if I could just remember that long ago.
Horse chesnuts were my vice at that age. Being from England and all, Conker fights were a necessary pass-time of the fall. If your wondering what a conker is, it’s just an English pet name for a horse chesnut. Why? because they make a sort of “Conk” sound when they hit things of course!(Yay for onomatopoeia!) Now if your wondering how you fight with them, well its very simple: you have two people put their most prized conker on the end of a string and then you take turns hitting your opponent’s chestnut. The first one to break off the string loses. Since I had moved to Canada around this time, the activity wasn’t nearly as practiced as back home. And so, seeing myself as an ambassador of sorts, I proceeded to explain the rules to everyone who would come within a square mile. Soon it was a craze at my school and everyone had their own conker on a string.
I think getting the conkers from the trees was probably the best part. To get the best ones, you had to knock virtually all the conkers off the tree and sometimes even more than one tree. I was, of course, the kid who climbed the tree and shook the branches until all the chestnuts fell off, raining spiky green balls upon all of my friends and on some memorable occasions, a few innocent bystanders :-).
After a hard days work of climbing, shaking branches, breaking open the chestnut shells and collecting a good 200 or so conkers, we would go to one of our friends houses or possibly my house. Once there we would proceed to spread all of our wares on the living room floor and begin sorting. With a group of four or more it was very easy to cover the entire floor of the living room, much to our mothers’ pleasure I am sure
After the initial sorting, each participant would end up with somewhere between 10 and 20 of the hardest, largest and roundest conkers you could find this side of Vancouver and possibly, we mused, the world! One by one, our best of the best would be strung, probably with the help our parents. It’s not as easy as it looks to drive a skewer through a horse chestnut without cracking or splitting it. At this point we would probably get a few games in, maybe one or two would break but by then the day would be out and we would have to go home.
The fun started at school the next day though, as soon as recess began. Once in the school yard, all the kids would somehow magically produce a strung conker from the recesses of their pockets and proceed to challenge another classmate. The same would happen at lunch and for about an hour after school. After about a week all the conkers would be starting to rot and the games would be much much shorter and a victor would emerge! And for an entire year, until the next conker season they would have the prestige of the ultimate warrior!
Ahh those were the days. So there is my story. Its a little long I guess but I hope you enjoyed it!
Happy developing guys!
Wow I totally didn’t realize it was that long haha. I hope that’s not that big of an issue.
Hmm…. I remember how being in an airport (first time, Damn! From Indonesia to Australia) and for a moment
imagining it as some sort of Fantasy Central, which I named at the time: ‘LostWays’.
I was lost (sob*), & overwhelmed by such a huge space, yet filled with crowded people from
all over the world, gives the illusion they’re like specks of lost imaginations,perhaps traveling to find their way back or something.
They would be accompanied by these sluggish box creatures (bags and luggages of course), perhaps for security measure, as they’ escort the passengers outside
or left behind on ‘belts’, into planes. Smaller sizes are kept all times.
But my fondest moment of that time is when a giant dog tries to sniff my bag. I thought he’s a ticket guard asking for tickets like in trains. I panicked, so gave him my sandwich instead. I was so desperate I began asking questions and so.
Of course the I was scolded by a real security guard, along with my family. That’s all!
I grew up on a farmhouse that was surrounded in all directions for about half a mile by fields. We owned the land around the farmhouse & surrounding buildings (house, barn, silos, two small warehouses, etc– all packed into fice acres), but an actual farmer owned the fields.
In the fall, when the wheat was all harvested, you could see a cluster of trees in the middle of the field. I was really curious about it. I had been told many times not to go off our property… but I did it anyway. Ran right across from the border of our land to the trees.
Apparently at some point, someone had used that spot as a junkyard. There was a deep pit in the center of the ring of trees, and it was full of old boards and scrap metal. I distinctly remember there being a doghouse perched on a wooden platform that had slanted about 30 degrees. There was sharp metal & broken glass & rusty nails all over the place and I, of course, loved it. Once you were past the trees, it was possible to see out in any direction, and impossible for anyone to see in.
I think I only went there two or three times, but it’s still the most memorable thing about the place, to me. (Unlike my parents, who still talk about the time I got locked out of the house in the middle of winter for hours.)
I couldn’t guess the number of hours I spent playing in the
“woods” by my house. In reality, it wasn’t a quarter acre in
size and the tree coverage was, by no means dense, but there were
a few places given cover by shrubbery.
In a way, I grew up in those woods. Early on, it was cowboys and
indians. Sometimes I was a lone cowboy on the run, other times a
native tracker in pursuit. Overtime, my scenerios changed with
me — from MacGyver inspired tales of entrapment and ingenius
escape to Quantum Leap styled bounds across time and space. I
explored many a scenerio in those woods — almost always a loner
with some great technology at my disposal. I look back and muse
over the fact that I never really fancied myself performing any
great heroic deeds. Imagination for the everyman, I guess–as
I’ve come to find to be true in reality, few of us are heroes.
From the shop clerk to the man in the Pentagon — most of us are
just doing our jobs.
My most vivid memory of those woods–well past 11 I’m sure–was
when I realized, rather suddenly, that “pretending” had lost its
magic. Suddenly I felt like a boy pretending rather than an
explorer of another world. I could almost see the fantasy melt
away and “the woods” become the pitiful little tree patch they
were.
Two friends and I were roaming in the forested area behind my parents’ house. Along the path, we ran into a snake and then a potato bug (which was quite new to us!).
Later that day, we found a sofa abandoned among the reeds in a river. We don’t know how it got there because this part of the river was in a deep canyon area..
I fondly remember exploring a “wasteland” behind one of my best friend’s house. Right over the fence, there was a *huge* ditch, that extended for many miles. Crossing the ditch, there were traintracks.. and a mysterious factory which — we could never spot anyone working or things moving, but we always heard a bunch of mechanical noises! it was kind of freaky, i used to think that aliens had invaded and set up a robot factory there.
further down the ditch, a literal wasteland was there — nothing but nasty looking earth. Interestingly, a friend of mine wrote a poem with the line “we wash our soul with toilet bowls” — and several months later we explored the wasteland, and in the forests behind it we found a toilet bowl! He told me about the poem then, and then showed it to me when we got back. It was super-real (surreal?). Once we went far enough down the ditch to find a settlement of about 12 tiny houses/shacks, and one old guy was staring at us..
On the train tracks we would pick up and throw pebbles and rocks a bunch, and we’d always take home one of the rail-road spikes that was lying around.
I went there three weeks ago (I’m 20 now) with another friend, and the magic of the wasteland still remains..
I used to play in the strangler fig in our front yard.
A strangler fig, if you don’t know, is a tree that grows around another tree, like a vine or epiphyte. Unlike most of those kinds of plants, strangler figs both wrap around their host, and drop runners down to the soil, which root and turn into “trunks.” You can end up with a tree that looks like an entire forest. Eventually, the original tree in the middle dies and rotss, and the fig can have all kinds of strange hollow spaces inside it.
This particular strangler fig had grown a hollow pouch of roots along one side. There was an opening at the top that was only just big enough for me to fit through, and I could see out between the vines, though it was harder to see me in it.
I should mention that as a kid I was really struck by the ocean. Not that I liked it - I found it pretty scary, and still do - but I thought it was incredible. Maps showed that oceans covered three times more area than land, and all the land put together was already way, way bigger than any I could imagine. But not only that, the ocean had depth. It had an up and down that was bigger than any building, any mountain! Wherever you were on top of the ocean, no matter how desolate it seemed, there were all kinds of things happening and living below you, separated by nothing at all. It scared the crap out of me.
So anyway, I must have read in some books about the bathysphere, that had recently gone deeper into the ocean than anyone ever had. It was ball-shaped, and just big enough for one person, and had just one little foggy porthole through which you could strain to see the pitch darkness of the infinite ocean.
So that’s where I went. Is it strange to imagine yourself in the midst of things which frighten you? I would climb in, pretend to close, dog and pressurize the hatch. I would look out and give a thumbs-up to the grizzled and bemused sailors operating the crane, and I would see the ocean rise up to engulf me. I would see myself drifting down in green light, rapidly turning indigo, uncaring schools of fish passing by and around me. Sharks would approach, but determine I was inedible and move on. Then, as all light failed, stranger things…
In the dense waters that far down, the lamps on my bathysphere only reached so far. Without anything to look at, I couldn’t tell if I was floating or still dropping. Hazy, floating shapes would become barely visible at the edge of my vision, then twist into something whip-thin before squirting away in alarm. Swarms of diaphanous _things_, pulsating red and white, would fly up across my line of sight…or was I passing them? There were networks of thick, veined ropey things, some kind of kelp, or maybe eel, or even the trailing tentacles of something regarding my craft as I might a snowflake.
Eventually, the bottom would rise up to meet me. The initial impact would create an opaque billow of murk, but when that cleared…
Years later, when I read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when I read the line “And a thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I,” I immediately thought of sitting on the floor of the sea, an incomprehensible alien to the life surrounding me, but stuck with them, alike with them, waiting…
I don’t remember ever imagining coming back up. I would just get tired of the adventure and climb out. But each time, I hesitated, afraid that if I “opened” the hatch, my life, and all evidence of it, would be crushed, and doomed to rot and rust amongst infinite, identical rot and rust.
Man! Alienation, mortality…I was a creepy kid! Nowadays, I play brightly colored electronic amusements. Much less depressing.
Wow, these are fantastic!
I’m so honored that you are sharing your memories on this little blog. I wonder how many strangers we pass every day with these kinds of worlds tucked away in their minds? It humbles me.
And it makes you understand why games like Lila Dreams can be so powerful–maybe we’re just trying to get back to those wondrous places that are now fading in the chaos of “being grown up.” Well, to heck with being grown up, I say! Let’s find our way to the boundless wonder of our collective imaginations.
So, keep ‘em coming! Long is not a problem. Write more than one, if you want.
Back in those days I had a pair of twins for best friends. They lived two houses down from me, and most days the two of them would come to my door and invite me to play. If we decided to to play at my house, the basement was our domain; our dwelling place. My family had a long and (to most of my siblings) irratating tradition of “pack-ratism” where we tended to stock pile basically everything, no matter how useless or outdated they seemed. Thus, our basement was a treasure trove of delightful and strange things. You can imagine the sort of fun we often had in its exporation.
Also in the basement was a bar. I distinctly remember a pair of wooden faces hung upon the wall behind this bar. One had the appearance of an old, wrinkly and decrepit woman with sunken and sullen eyes. The other had a spanish sombrero, thick ’stache and a serious honker of a nose. The twins and I, we loved these wooden faces. We would crawl up upon the bar counter and we would take our stubby fingers and unceremoniously poke them in their noses.
“WHO DID THAT?” In irratation, they would scowl and curse at us. Voiced of course by our own silly selves. Yet relentless children we were, and bother them endlessly again and again we did… Looking back, I remember actually believing that they really did have personalities of their own. Even though we spoke for them, it was truely they who spoke their piece of mind.
Should we have grown bored of pestering the poor agitated things, the three of us may very well have instead ventured to my backyard to brave the vine entangled, alien infested jungles that miraculously resided solely between the narrow 3-foot space between the fence of my backward and my neighbour’s…
Nicholas: My fascination went from dinosaurs to Nessie, and today, to the deep sea creatures that are just too fantastic to imagine. I love photos like these:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/photogalleries/Antarctica-pictures/index.html
We didn’t have a computer yet and I think all my video game time was sequestered to my Sega Genesis at the time. But to keep the story from being anchored by anachronisms…
We would go bike riding in a neighborhood wooded area.
The area was the site of a failed apartment building. By failed, I mean they failed to finish building it, that is. The foundation was there and all the dirt they dug out of the way of the foundation was overgrown with grass and weeds. The area was still wooded with small trees maybe 20 feet in height. We, my friend Scott and I, would go here to race bikes through a sort of obstacle course that we created. We would ride up the small dirt hills and do some sick jumps over fallen branches.
The spiders were enormous and we had to constantly clear their webbings out of our trail. MREs would be littered across the ground in certain areas as well as muscle magazines. The military meals we thought were from homeless vets living in the area that would shop at the local Army Surplus store, but we had no ideas about the magazines.
There was an interesting hole just off to the side of the foundation that looked to be built into the local sewer line. We never dared to go down the hole, there was way too much broken glass and sharp pieces of wood with nails just waiting to be stepped on. Scott would always dare me, but I was too chicken.
When it would start to get too dark we would head back home usually stopping by the local water retention pond to skip stones or these weird potato-looking things that grew on vines along the chain-link fence.
I’m glad we never ran into the owners of the MREs and magazines in hindsight. That would have probably kept me from ever going back to the woods.
There was this large creek, maybe a river, behind my friends house. It was a short walk down the pipestem from my house. The creek was surrounded by a wooded area, and most of my time living there was spent exploring that area with my friends.
The area was full of areas that would fascinate us. Our two favorites that I remember were rocky areas we had to climb over, me and my frinds always enjoyed the challenge. The second area was a fifteen minute walk down the creek, where there were these small islands. They were so much fun, the ground was covered in shells, and there were trees perfect for climbing. The islands were jumping distance apart, the water between them extremely shallow, but it was amazing to our young minds. Each island seemed different. One was grassy and had a huge tree, another was open. It was great.
Anotehr past time spent in the woods was fort building. Me and my friend would find areas perfect for fort building, and we’d bring sticks to the area and build walls and bridges. My favorite was just off the creek. It required an easy rock climb up to the site, and we had to build a bridge over a gap to get there. The actual site was two large flat boulders, and earth ledge below there. IT was amazing. I loved that time.
The fact that you’re interested in our stories really excites me — it’s sounding to me like Lila Dreams is in part about the very magic of Life, not “just” a game. Go Creatrix!
well…
When I was 11 I was a bit of a loner^^;
I had to change schools when I was 9 and, despite what everyone said, I didn’t make any new friends at my new school. I kinda made up an imaginary friend in my head though, and I liked to read and create worlds inside my head (which, incindentally, is why this game sounds so good to me). The friend’s name was/is Alexander. I say ‘is’ because he isn’t really gone. I had a very good imagination and the imaginary friend I made wasn’t even invisible(in the sense that I knew what he looked like). He was my age and looked a lot like me, but not exactly, and as I aged so did he, but we look completely different now. He’s slightly taller, his hair is a bit lighter (we both have brown hair) he has no facial hair, etc.
Anyways.
By the time I was 15 he was essentially at, if not beyond, a human level of thought, he has his own personality, his own life, his own conciousness, his own moral values, his own world, etc.
Obviously, most people give up on their imaginary friends long before this, probably because they have real friends. I didn’t because I basicaly considered Alexander as real, even at age 15, taking AP Physics as a Freshmen in highschool. I had made real friends by now, but I never told any of them about my secret friend. I thought/think that they wouldn’t understand. Around that time, I started thinking I might be schitzophrenic and was wondering if I should see a psychiatrist. I decided against it, not because I don’t think I could be schitzophrenic, but because I don’t want to be cured if I am. If it wasn’t for Alexander, I would be dead, and/or a drug adict, and/or a gangster. Alexander has essentially become my concience, a voice of strong, albiet often slightly misguided, moral fiber in my head. He has taught me the majority of the things I know, which I suppose means I’ve taught myself, but it seems rather different than that. It is a bit of a sad position however, because he wishes he could be real in this world, but I know he probably never will. I let him be me every now and then for a few minutes to a few hours (which is why I think I’m schitzo) but it’s not the same. He’s a fighter ship pilot from a futuristic world, a frontiersman who needs adventure and unexplored frontier to survive. It’s become a dream of ours to try to create his ship, but doing so is impossible, according to Einstein, so…
Anyways. About him.
He was an orphan living in a junkyard with three sisters and a cousin, dirt poor but incredibly gifted. His sisters build him a small fighter-class space ship out of the junk in the junkyard for his birthday, because it has always been his dream to be a pilot. 6 months of my life dealt with this period in his life, his schooling, bullying, class divisions and ecomic barriers (I didn’t know what they were called then, though), the morality of laws, and the development of personalities for him and his family, and other people on their world. Then, Aliens attacked. My ‘Aliens’ were essentially bright green colored people who were generally taller by a bit than humans and had abnormally pointy teeth, but were otherwise physically identical. They enslave most of the people, including two of Alexander’s sisters and his cousin, and Alexander and his sister Cenomore set off to free their relatives and the planet. They lead a raid on a slave ship that has landed to pick up prisoners, and liberate a small group of people and a cargo ship before the slave ship escapes. They find out at this point that the elite class of people on their planet has been cooperating with the Aliens. The rebellion and reclamation of Alexander’s world took the remaining 6 months of my 11-year old period, after which he attacks a giant artificial world and frees his sisters (their cousin sucessfully escapes on her own while on the artificial world and starts a slave rebellion) and they set off together with a steadily growing fleet to liberate the universe. But that is my story, and I’ve probably bored you to death already ^^;
So yah. I’m kinda a weird kid. Sorry if I freaked you out ^^;
P.S. In case you didn’t notice, Alexander has kinda integrated himself in other ways too. He’s the name I use when I don’t want to give out my real one.
yeah, this is waaaay off topic, but I just read this article on gamasutra and thought you guys might be interested in having a read (the game designers). I don’t remember being 11 so I can’t help you out there
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3604/fixing_online_gaming_idiocy_a_.php?page=4
oops, ull want to change that page=4 to a 1 at the end..
One of my favorite memories was constructing huge toy wars. Sometimes creating teams and alliances, sometimes free for alls. My favorite wars came about when my family would plan house upgrades, like a new plumbing system. After calling a bunch of workers to the house to dig up the old pipes we were left with a network of three foot deep, two foot wide trenches all around our yard. It was great to dig out little bunkers and tunnels and things to stage my wars. After that I could fill them up with water and have a canal battle. I wish I could still do that…
I used to zoom in on things, think about what it would be like if I was much, much smaller. My front lawn could be a dense forest with giant monsters (insects) creeping through the undergrowth. A playground could be a gigantic castle. And if a blade of grass was taller, relatively, than any tree I’d ever seen, then how big were trees? I would spend hours staring at trees and imagining myself living as some miniscule human in them, climbing through the deep chasms in the bark towards my home in the leafy hights.
At 11 years old I was taking ballet lessons regularly, and we had to do stretching exercises on the floor. The room had full-length wall mirrors on three sides and a window on the last one, and from the floor I could only see ths sky through the window and nothing underneath, so it was easy to pretend the room was really high up (as opposed to being on the 5th floor of a shopping centre).
Sometimes I’d picture the wall with the window in it to be full-length mirrored as well, leaving the window as an opening, and the entire class would be a bunch of ballerina-figurines with the pianist playing, which would make the room the inside of a music-box. A really high-up music box floating in the sky, with mirrored insides.
Speaking of ballet lessons in shopping centres, much envy towards the people who say they grew up with greenery around them; I don’t get much of it here. >.<
My childhood was miserable.
I was loved and nurtured, but i lived near a zoo. I saw the faces of monkeys and wanted to live with them. I was tired of being a spoiled kid with a fishing pole and a gameboy. I wanted a monkey parent. To swing freely and be naked.
Some imagery from when i was 10 and a half.
fish.
grave yards.
rain.
pine trees and palm trees.
palm beach.
grandma’s cookies and grandpa’s farts.
being scared.
alligators.
raccoons.
grilled cheese.
mac and cheese.
marshmallow fluff sandwiches.
Super Mario.
trumpet lessons.
the zoo.
i still play mario and i work at that zoo.
so lol.
I remember playing hide and seek in the wheat fields and how there was a patch that never seemed to grow too well. I remember going rollerblading on the unfinished highway, how at the time I was in awe of how a few years back this massive stretch of concrete was all forest. I remember standing on the top of that suspender bridge, 500 feet in the air with nothing but some bits of grating holding me up, how afraid I was, how that fear faded, how I began to realise how wonderful it was… But that’s going a little far forward now.
Most of the things I did at that age have been swallowed up by time, but a few things stand out in my memory.
I spent my early years in a very urban area (Los Angeles), and in case you’ve never been, even the parks don’t give you the feeling of Nature. They were far too manicured and maintained to be considered in any way natural. But there was a place behind my house that I and some of my friends would sneak into when the grown-ups weren’t looking. The chain-link fence was bent down at the top from the local kids jumping over so many times, occasionally someone would even sit atop it for a moment before jumping (or sliding) down to the opposite side. In any case, on the far side of this fence there was a wooded area. Dense trees and low foliage obscured us from outside view. On the far side of the trees, there was a freeway exit with a constant stream of traffic, so it was as though Nature had taken root in a crack of the artificially created world that we were forced to live in. A place where anything could happen, and often did.
I remember one entanglement of low horizontal branches, in particular, as being an exceptional cockpit for anything ranging from space exploration and epic battles to deep sea submersion or race car driving. There were a number of well placed branches suited for every task. A seat, foot pedals, steering, and so on. We also shared a fascination with fire, so burning anything we could get our hands on with a magnifying glass was always a great way to spend some time. It was something magical that couldn’t be quantifiable by any normal means. It wasn’t solid or liquid, and it wasn’t quite a gas either. I remember musing for quite some time about what a flame was actually made up of. This, in turn, reminds me of the time I came up with the brilliant idea of freezing water balloons, but never having the heart to actually use them in the heat of mock-battle.
Playing in and with the trees, rain, and fire. That’s what I remember most fondly, I think.
As an 11 year old kid i was such an annoying person. The most important highlight of that age was falling on my knee and getting stitches, I deserved it XD.
There was an old abandoned house in the lot next to my school. There was nothing blocking us from looking at it while we played on the playground. A few times we played around it, but we were never actually supposed to go in it.
When we were 11, I and a few other members of my class decided to try going in and exploring. We walked up the creaky stair to the creaky door and pushed it open gently. The aged hinges creaked open, and the old house creaked a hello to us in its tired language of creaks and moans. With the door open, I motioned to another few friends who hovered quietly at the bottom of the stairs to come on up. Slowly, they too ascended the creaky stairs and entered the creaky door. Silently, we all stared through the door, waiting to see who would cross its creaky thresh hold first. With an answering creak, I took the first step and passed through the entrance. Inside, there was dust covering all of the creaky floorboards and creaky stair rails. The first room we stepped in was huge, and I walked in only a few creaky feet before stopping to look around at the inside of the creaky old house. A friend quickly walked past me to the center of the creaky room, and looked around. “Its just a creaky old house, see? Nothing to be afraid.”
The house responded with a creak. And then with another creak. And then with a crack. A loud crack that seemed to interrupt the tired sounds with jarring suddenness. And then another cracked followed as the creaky floor cracked beneath my friends feet, and his legs broke through the old floor. I rushed forward to grab him and pull him out of the hole as a few other friends quickly joined me. We heaved him out of the hole with a creak and quickly scampered out of the building. As we fled the building for the safety of the playground, the house seemed to laugh at us as we departed. Its laughs sounded like creaks, though.
(Addendum: In later years, I learned that this lot had actually been donated to the school already a few years before this happened, and there just wasn’t the funding to do anything with it. So it just stayed as the “haunted house” of the school. A few years after I graduated, the school actually managed to reconstruct it to a nice and well put together dormitory building for out of town students. So now its not there anymore :). )
Well… My childhood. Great times. I was raisen in a city on the countryside. We had a really beautiful river passing through the city… I used to jump into there with a bycicle. It was funny.
But the best part of my childhood was the travels. Oh… Used to stay in my gramma’s house in some holidays. And that city was really nice. My biggest adventure of my childhood was in that town.
One day, me and some friends entered some some bizarre abandoned warehouse. Exploring all the rooms, we managed to find a finger! Oh, yeah, really creepy. We obviously rushed outta there. Later, I discovered that it used to be a kidnapping cell.
But, while we were rushing outta there, someone got in the warehouse too. We didn’t even care to see who it was. If he was a kidnapper? Or something like that? We were desperate to leave the place. But we couldn’t leave the place easily, since there was someone near the front door. The only other door was jammed. So, we left the warehouse using a tree that was near a window. And we just ran away. Dangerous, but lots of adrenaline.
Let’s see… 11, huh?
Well, when I was 11, my family (me, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and my two cousins) went on a vacation to some RV park. The RV park was rather large, but the highlight of it for my cousins and I was the forest. It wasn’t a large forest, nor was it particularly dense, but it had lots of pathways and many large trees, some suited to be climbed, and climb them we did. Our favorite thing to do was to imagine the forest was some crazy fantasy land, full of trolls and talking trees and the like. We would walk seperate ways, and we would just stroll around, and sometimes we’d go up the trees and pretend to be one of the talking trees or some such thing, and then on the ground we’d act like dashing, courageous explorers expressing out intent to map this wondrous land, and the “trees” would shout that surely some evil soul would try to cut them down, and we would say that we would only tell the people we trusted, but the trees would not accept this, and they demanded that no map ever be made of the place. Then, when the third person found us, trying to convince each other, they would act as though they were one of the evil people, trying to cut down the trees and turn the place into more space for supermarkets and fast food joints. But we would never allow that, and we chased these evil people out of the forest, and then we had s’mores and the evil people would see the light and realize that cutting down these glorious trees was wrong. We did this cycle many times, slightly changing it each time, and sometimes two of us would meet up before finding the talking tree. And I think that, maybe, we sort of thought it was real. Maybe.
Over-active imagination runs in the family, by the way.
I grew up on a 900-acre tropical island in the Pacific Ocean. The islands are sort of in a ring, and so on two sides of the island the water gets very deep very quickly; it’s called the dropoff, and even though the water was exceptionally clear, you didn’t have two swim more than a little ways past the dropoff before you couldn’t see the sea floor at all. We used to take big hunks of coral (the entire island is made of coral sand) or other things that wouldn’t float, struggle to swim them over the dropoff, and release them to fall out of sight. It was strange and mystical to have what for our purposes was more or less a vast bottomless pit only a few hundred yards from the house. I’ve always loved fantastic ocean-dwelling creatures, and the idea that there could be hidden monsters lurking just out of sight where the water got dark was close to a religious experience for me. I -always- brought the cheap point-and-shoot camera my parents bought me when I went out on a boat ride, because I -knew- that it was only a matter of time before I would see a sea monster or a giant squid or something even stranger. Sometimes the film would come back with a bunch of random pictures of the surface of the water, because my instincts had told me that something was about to breach the surface.
I grew up swimming in the lagoon, where there were some dangerous animals. Most sharks that come into shallow areas aren’t dangerous to people if you leave them alone, but I was (and to some extent continue to be, though I now live in Minnesota, far from the ocean) terrified of stonefish. They’re fish that look exactly like any other coral rock, but have poisonous spines just waiting to impale my poor eleven-year-old self. In my mind, every even vaguely fish-shaped rock was a potential threat.
For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve envisioned my hometown as a fantasy city filled with marble towers and spires and a giant maze-like sewer system beneath the streets and a vast bazaar to the west serving as the only contact with the outside world.
All this was under eternal cloud cover created by the aura of a sorrowing angel.
I used to have a hobby of trying to get to the rooftops of the tallest buildings in town, and was often successful in my ventures. Churches, apartments, offices all fell before my ingenuity and evasiveness.
One day, I was downtown with a friend, and we were walking in the shadow cast by the tallest building in the entire city, a ritzy retirement tower, and it dawned upon me that I might just be able to get on the roof.
After prying open the side door in the alleyway next to the building, we shot up the concrete stairs, and to our dismay we learned that they only went up about four stories. I didn’t waver, and waltzed into the main building searching for a way up. I found the exit to a patio outside, and found from there a ladder leading to the service stairwell on the next floor. (Why I couldn’t just go up the elevator and get into the service stairwell on one of the higher-up floors I’ll never know).
This stairwell led all the way up, to a small room with dusty electrical equipment and a door leading out to the rooftop.
We sat up there for hours, just looking at the city around us, and occasionally making and throwing down a paper airplane or two.
It was magical.
When I was eleven or twelve, my family moved to the rural community where my grandparents lived. Twenty feet from our house was a large barn with a large sliding door. The barn had a large loft with a trapdoor up to it. the barn was really messy, with all kinds of junk and hay scattered around. One day, the two neighbour boys invaded the barn and locked my sister and I and our friends out. It felt like war, and I think my friends and I started planning how to retake the barn. But after a while, the neighbour boys opened the sliding door . . . and we discovered that they had cleaned the place up! We spent a lot of time in the barn after that, making ithe loft into a fortress that was safe against crab apple missiles.
It didn’t snow much in South Carolina so one day when it did, a friend and I went out in the woods near the library. There were lots of trees and a series of hills, one after another. The hills were sort of tricky to climb with the snow everywhere. After climbing about ten hills we were completely lost. It was a very strange feeling to be in strange weather in between almost identical hills. Eventually we found a unfamiliar street, and eventually went the correct direction to find a familiar one and return to the library where our parents were.
I remember being 11, I lived in a country home. I had a big oak tree in my front yard with a flower bed around it. I imagined that the plants could move and talk, could fly, and many other things. The oak tree was the oldest and wisest tree around, and the other plants would ask it for help. Leaves were like horses, they let other plants fly around on them, and I always hated it when my dad would cut the lawn. There wouldn’t be any clovers or dandelions, or any wildflowers.
I would also catch bees in a jar. Me and my friend Justin would see how many bees we could catch in one jar, honey bees were worth 1 point, bumble bees were worth two points, and wasps were worth 5 points. We only ever managed to catch eight bees in one jar though.
I have a couple here.
Ok at age 11 i was in the 6th grade maybe 5th
I would run around the school playground playing a form of medieval warfare with my friends.We would imagine dragons, castles, and pretty much anything.
We made a antfarm in the school playground, imagining a huge metropolis underneath. We would bring them sugar and build little huts with twigs and grass.
I also remember running through the woods behind my house, building forts and secret paths and whatnot, We would swing on a vine we found over a stream for fun, climb trees etc.
I remember playing a game with a couple close friends on the playground after school where we would go to another world, it changed each time. Sometimes it had dragons and knights, others it would be underwater with sharks around every corner. I remember one game where you could be anything and everything you could imagine. We would be tigers, dinosaurs, and other bizarre creatures running through an urban jungle on the run from hunters.
I can remember playing a game where we had a secret language and were wild people. Talking to sprites and fairies. We would make ‘potion’s’ out of grass, water and whatnot.
This wasn’t when i was 11, but it refers to the divore area
I remember waking up one day, everything being usual. Dad taking me to pre-school , mom at work. I got home later, and i can’t remember much. But my mom just disappeared for a month, though my dad kept telling me she was OK. I remember a huge sense of loss after that month, confusion, everything seemed larger and scarier, i began to freak out at shadows in my room, dreaming once that i was a puppet in a huge mansion being chased by something. I heard my mom scream and ran into a room, only to see her change into a huge black form that began to open its jaws to eat me. I woke up screamng.
I hope one or more of these strike a light or something.
Good stuff! Keep it coming, everyone.
It’s really great to hear so many childhood stories.
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