I crept up the stairway. My sister Mary was in her bedroom practicing her forensics speech, and I wanted to listen without her knowing. Just as I slithered quietly across the hardwood floor to the room’s doorway, I heard Mary begin speaking. In dignified tones, she spoke of the life and values of a UN General Secretary named Dag Hammarskjold. I pictured myself in her place getting up to speak to an audience and receiving applause when I was finished. My sister’s speech made me sad. The man she spoke of as being so special died in a suspicious airplane accident.

All my older siblings did interesting things. Instead of playing by myself, I often tagged along with them and enjoyed their amazing adventures. I didn’t envy what they were doing because in my mind, I was participating in the adventure along with them.

I never knew what sort of things would happen when following my brothers. Whatever they did, it was always sure to be a lot of fun. On a summer afternoon one of them bought a half a dozen small firecrackers while in town. Just setting them off one after the other didn’t sound like fun. Everyone did that. All six would be used up too quickly. They decided to light a firecracker and put it under an empty soup can: to see how high the explosive would blow it off the ground, and what damage it would do to the can.

Standing far away from the test site, I screamed with excitement when the can rocketed into the air, shooting almost as high as the highline wires. Finding where it landed in tall grass, I crowded in beside my brothers to examine the blackened, bent metal can.

Many of my childhood memories are recorded in photos because one of the first things Mom bought when she could afford it after her Depression era marriage, was a Kodak Brownie camera. It may have cost her only a dollar, but the gift of pictures it faithfully recorded is beyond price. Although we couldn’t see what the camera captured until the film was full and sent in to be developed, we had fun with it. I remember my brothers climbing the big cotton wood trees to take pictures of our yard to see it the way birds see it. Did I climb the trees with them? I feel like I was up there with them.

Trying to do trick photography one afternoon, my brother Casper strapped a pole to a wagon in the driveway and hung a small fish he caught on it. Then he instructed me to stand across the yard next to the haymow door and look up and act amazed. Lining up the fish in the viewfinder so that it looked as big as me in the background, he pressed the button. We didn’t realize the fish was too close to the camera and was overexposed until months later when the film was developed.

On an afternoon when Mom was away from home, two of my sisters decided to make some candy that needed to be stretched over and over. I enjoyed each and every buttery stretch and fold we made with the sweet treat. I thought they called the candy, ‘Kathy’. I innocently questioned, “This is Kathy candy?” convinced someone had named candy after me.

They laughed at me and said, “No. It’s taffy, you know, with a t…as in teeth!”

As an eleven your old I watched my closest in age sister get ready to attend the prom with a date. First, she put on her fancy, ruffled dress, then she carefully put on make-up, trying to make it subtle enough to pass Mom’s inspection. Finally, she put a small dab of perfume behind her ears. I felt her excitement and wanted to go to the prom, too. However, when her date arrived to pick her up, I disappeared, not wanting any part of that.

In tagging along after my older siblings, I learned something each time. Some people would say I was living vicariously through them, but I don’t agree. What I experienced through them was my own joy. The man Mary spoke of in her forensics speech, Dag Hammarskjold, had many famous quotes. The one that I feel fits my childhood goes; “Maturity, among other things, is the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his playmates.”