It’s really great to hear so many childhood stories.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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 . )