- Knots: I did struggle with learning knots in Boy Scouts, but I think I managed to retain enough to get by.
- Sharpening a Knife: I can do that well enough that I don't care if I buy a knife that isn't sharp as long as it's capable of taking an edge.
- Starting a Fire: It's a sad boy who doesn't know how to start a fire.
- Direction: I am not as good with a compass as I'd like to be, but I can walk a relatively straight line when I need to.
- Fishing: I have done so, but didn't become good at it because I thought it was boring.
- Bicycling (Unsupervised Mobility): We could cover a lot of distance on a bike, despite it being assembled from bicycle parts.
- Changing/Repairing a Tire: I have repaired bicycle tires and can change my own car tire, but I prefer to let AAA do it.
- Fighting: Since I'm such a nice guy, I have never had the occasion. We scrapped a little as kids, but no one was seriously angry.
- Childhood Jobs: My Grit route, things to do on the farm, and I got cheated working a whole haying season without getting paid.
- Boredom (Free Time, Thinking Time): I never considered thinking time to be boredom, but I had plenty of free time as a kid.
- A Voice (Memorization, Recitation): There have been times when it was nice to be able to recite something from memory.
- Manners, Respect: I can't say that I valued that as much as some people, but I don't think I was horribly rude.
- Disappointment, Failure: It's as important to be able to survive failure as it is to want to avoid it.
- Truth, Honesty: When it counts, yes.
- Being Left Alone: As a child, I think this was very important. I pity kids who have all of their time planned out for them.
On #4, I would like to be able to be more proficient with a compass, but learning to use a compass properly is something that I have always had a hard time with. For some reason, that's the kind of thing that escapes me, sometimes. When in the woods, even on my own land, I make a point of knowing what surrounds the area that I am going to be in, and then I just wander, which is how I like to enjoy the woods. However, once I realize that I'm lost, I do know how to walk a relatively straight line in the woods (which is not as easy as you might think it is), and as long as I can do that, I'll eventually come out to something that I recognize, although sometimes I'm surprised at where that is.
On #6, we could bicycle from my home in Wallace, Michigan, to Lake Michigan, to Shaky Lakes, and a couple of different rivers. My cousins and I had bikes that were put together from old bicycle parts by an uncle, yet they worked fine, although one speed, of course. From about the age of 12, we could make multi-day bike trips, although I would let my parents know about these in advance; otherwise, we didn't have to tell anyone where we were going.
On #10, some people, even when I was a kid, think they have to have something to do all the time, as if thinking doesn't count as doing something. But if my friends (cousins) weren't available, usually because they had work to do around the house, or were playing some dumb-ass sport that I wasn't interested in, I enjoyed just wandering in the woods or reading a book.
On #12, I can remember the first time I had a teacher who wanted to be addressed by his first name: Ron Nordin, who taught all of the English, literature, and speech classes in high school. Otherwise, teachers were addressed as Mr., Mrs., or Miss, and my uncles and aunts were addressed as Uncle Art, Aunt Dora, and so on, although I didn't refer to them by these labels when I was talking about them unless it was necessary for clarity (for example, to differentiate Uncle Art from other people by that name).
On #13, like many others, I wasn't a big fan of disappointment or failure, and I still feel the sting of things that happened sixty years ago. Nevertheless, it is important to be allowed to fail. When we were working on things as children, my Dad didn't step in to solve our problems for us, choosing to let us try it our way and either succeed or fail, and I think that was a good thing.
On #14, honesty and the truth are clearly good things. However, for a good portion of my life, and even now sometimes, I enjoyed the academic challenge of trying to persuade people that I was right about something, even after I realized that I was wrong, but that was more of a linguistic exercise than the emotional need to be right.
