Lara Ferroni Photography

It’s been quite some time… since September in fact, since I’ve done a non-cooking related meme, so I was quite happy to oblige when Melissa, author of one of my all time, most favorite, bestest-blog ever, Traveler’s Lunchbox tagged me a meme. Actually, she kind of tagged me with two memes… the 5 Things meme that’s been going around and My Life in leaps of 5. She did both, and upon tagging me and my fellow taggees, left it up to us to decide how we want to proceed. The point of the memes is to tell you things about me that you don’t already know… and like many other bloggers out there, well, I find this somewhat hard. You already know that I was born on Guam, struggle when I photograph eggs, that I can’t spell or punctuate despite being an english major, and that I have a certain affinity for home-roasted coffee and other tasty beverages. You probably also know that I love to shop for props at thrift stores, and spend far too much time taking photos of food, or drooling over those that others have taken. So, what other little nuggets can I share?

As I started thinking about little life stories, I realized quite an odd thing. A disproportional number of them happened when I was around 5 years old. So, rather than what happened every five years or five random facts that you didn’t know about me from my whole life, I decided to answer with 5 things you don’t know about me from when I was 5.

Let’s start out with a bang… my childhood crime spree.
When I was 5, I set my neighbors yard on fire. I’d call it an accident, but how much of an accident can it really be when I specifically lit the match over a dry pile of leaves to show off to my friend how I, an invincible five year old at the time, could easily handle fire. I’m not sure I could call it pre-planned, but I do specifically remember finding the book of matches in a parking lot and eagerly and quickly stuffing them in my pocket before anyone could see me and put a stop to it. As the flame burned down the short, paper match, of course burning my tiny child fingers, I dropped the match and ran and hid in the closet. Only my mother, frantically calling for me as the fire engines came could get me out. Once the emergency had passed, and luckily only a small amount of damage had actually occurred, I was made to go and apologize to the family. I’m happy to report that pyromania has not been an ongoing past time in my life.

Not only a young arsonist, I was also a bit of an anatomical freak.
When I was five, I had a problem with my hip and shoulders coming out of their sockets. Sometimes, they would just slip out. I don’t remember much about why or how, but I can still take my hip out a bit if I think about it.

I was no Dr. Doolittle…
When I was five, I was bitten by a large German Shepherd while walking home from a party at a my parent’s friend’s house. Why, you might ask, was a five year old walking home alone? Good question. One my parents still can’t quite figure out an answer for. I’ll chalk it up to it was a different time, in a small neighborhood. Anyway, as I was walking home, this big German Shepherd… I believe his name was King… started eyeing me. I wasn’t afraid of dogs, but I crossed the street, because King was a bit of a barker and quite a bit larger than I was. Apparently, he didn’t want me crossing the street, and came barreling after me. The next 30 seconds or so passed before my eyes in super slow-motion, as King toppled me over and took a good nip at my leg, tearing through my jeans and leaving quite an indent on my calf (but no actual breaking of skin). At that point, the whole scene becomes a bit blurry. King went away somehow… either by being bored that he no longer had prey to chase or by someone pulling him off of me, and I made my way back home. You’d think from such an experience, I’d have developed a bit of a fear of animals… but on the contrary, I think it was around that point in my life that I decided that I was going to become a veterinarian… something I was set on doing until my late high school years.

But I did have a good sense of the environment and the value of a buck…
My family has always been in to recycling. I remember when I was five, we’d go about picking up aluminum cans (and other trash) just to clean up the neighborhood. We’d take big bags of cans and newspapers into the recycle center every month or so, and I got to keep the money for the cans that I’d pick up. I always wondered why in the world people just threw out stuff that was so valuable (hey, $2 to a 5 year old was a lot in those days).

..and, there was always a life as aqua-girl.
We had one of those free-standing, above ground pools at my house in Cranston, Rhode Island when I was five, and that’s where I learned to swim. I learned through deceit and lies. My father, knowing my abilities far more than I knew myself, would stand just beyond my reach and tell me to swim to him, promising not to move. Then, as I approached, he would slowly back up… never out of reach to a dangerous point, but far enough that it forced me to swim further than I thought that I could. Each time, I would get very, very mad at him, as only a five year old can do, and insist that he was backing up and that I’d only swim again if he promised that he wouldn’t. Which, of course, he would do. And, then, of course proceed to back up. Think Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. Eventually, he would find that he had backed all the way to the other side of the pool. At that point, I had no recourse in yelling, as clearly I could swim well enough to cross the pool. It didn’t take long after that for me to be completely comfortable in the water and love spending as much time as possible below the surface. At one point, I believed that I could kind of breathe underwater– a theory which luckily I never really put to the test. These days, I’m happier to sit next to the pool, and soak up the sun, preferably with some god-awful fruity drink in hand.

So, there you go. I think this meme has been going around for quite a bit now, so I’m not going to re-tag. But, if you feel like sharing, please do!

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