Sharing Memories Week 5: Naughty Things You Did as a Kid

Sharing Memories and Photo Books I have created

To encourage all genealogists (and myself!) to write our stories, Sharing Memories is a series of weekly prompts to help with writing up memories of our ancestors and our childhood. 

We all love to find a diary or letters written by great grandma or grandpa where they talk about their lives and share their memories. Think how excited one of your descendants will be to read about your memories and your stories! These stories will be lost unless we preserve them. And what better way than in a weekly themed post. 

Just think - at the end of the year you will have 52 stories written about your childhood, your parents, grandparents and who knows what else. I've been writing my stories and memories down for 3 years now. At the end of each year I create a book of those stories (plus photos) and give one to each of my children. What a treasure you can create for your children and grandchildren.

If you write your own blog please use the hashtag #52SharingMemories if you are posting on Twitter or Google+  That way I can provide links to your blog posts at the end of the week. You can also  post your stories as comments on this blog post or in a private journal. It's your choice! The important thing is to write those memories down now! 

This week's prompt is about any naughty or devilish things you did as a kid. I already talked about playing hooky in Grade 2 or 3 and locking the school bathroom doors. But I did a couple of other bad things too at home. We were rather poor and didn't have much - no carpets on the floors or paintings on the walls and no television or radio. But when I was about 10 years old they bought a stereo. The stereo was one of those big ones that housed a radio and a record player. 

It was my dad's pride and joy. It was so beautiful! We didn't have pretty things in our house and I thought that huge gleaming brown cabinet was gorgeous. I cannot explain why I did what I did. But one day I took a tiny screwdriver out of my mom's sewing kit and scratched my initials on the hinged lid of the record player.  

                           L. M. 

As soon as I finished the wavy lettering I wanted to remove it! I thought of how angry my parents would be. I felt sick at what I'd done but it was too late for remorse. The odd things is that I was not angry when I did it. I just thought it was such a beautiful finish that I wanted to carve something on it. I'd actually wanted to create a picture but hadn't realized how difficult it would be to carve in nice neat lines. So I settled for my initials. 

To make things worse, when my parents got home and saw it I lied and said it must have been my brother. His initials were the same as mine. But since he was 10 years older than me my parents knew it wasn't him. I wasn't punished as far as I remember although they sent me to my room to do some serious thinking. They talked to me about it because all in all I was a very quiet obedient kid and honestly I rarely did anything bad!

I seem to recall they bought me some paper and pencils after that so I could draw as much as I wanted. I still have some of my first drawings. And I've never carved my initials on anything since!