One of the best things about being a kid was being able to fly, albeit only for short durations.
Some schoolmates and I used to take turns, two at a time, riding the top of a ladder down from an arena roof. For a brief time, we flew. Yes, it was arcing downward, but when you’re a little tyke, who’s to quibble.
Many years later I came across Mike P., the Human Probe, who had five brothers, who collective had to chop down trees for firewood. He told me that one would chop, and the other four would ride the top of the tree down. And so they flew too.
Not unless as a child you played soccer with your brothers using live field rats as balls, and as an adult hitched an occupied portable toilet to a buddy’s hovering helicopter.
I think all kids go through an “elemental” stage: playing with earth, air, fire, and water. I played with dirt, or rather, mud: sketching my idea of the topography of Mars in the driveway. (My dad finally made me hose it away because family was going to visit and they would need to park their cars.) Water was filling up the sink and happily pouring water from one container to another. Air was turning on the fan and using it, instead of breath, to blow bubbles (neat idea, except the soap dripped on the carpet) and floating kleenex out the window (my mom was unamused).
Well, fire…My mom lit a candle in the hall, to get a musty smell out of the house, she said. I discovered that when you hold a sheet of paper above a flame, a brown/black circle forms and gets bigger and bigger. Despite warnings, I kept doing this, until I inevitably turned the paper vertical, and the flame attached itself to my hand. Had to keep my hand in cold water the rest of the day; no scars.
But the biggie was when my dad left the hibachi on the patio with the coals still smoldering. I’ve blocked out exactly what happened, but…Anyone remember the Calvin and Hobbes sequence where Calvin tried to fix the bathroom sink, with predictable results? His parents hear him coming down the stairs: “La la la…Don’t mind me…I just need a bucket to hold some…stuff…Hm, how many buckets do we have? Dum de doo…”
All I clearly remember is my mom standing on the porch yelling, “Fuck the hibachi; the whole patio’s on fire!” My dad used the hose to put it out, and my mom slammed me onto a bench, saying, “Now, I want you to sit there and THINK about all the fires you’ve caused, and what could have happened!”