One day when I was about 6, the power went out just as my brother began bottling some beer he had made in a stone crock that used to belong to our grandmother. We lit candles, and someone started playing 78s from the 1920s on the old wind-up Victrola. I sat on the floor next to my brother, transfixed, watching the amber liquid rise up out of the crock through the clear tubing, curlicuing around until it reached the pressure valve he used to slowly deposit it in each bottle. The kitchen smelled like vanilla and honey, and the lights didn't come back on for the rest of the night.

That was a good day.

When I was 10, an elderly Finnish man -- some kind of relative removed two or three times by marriage -- made me a challenge after watching me chop wood at our cabin. He bet me that I would not be able to find a log that he could not split in "one shot." I rollled my eyes. How old was this guy, 90? 100? Well, probably more like 75, but still.

I found a log that I knew I probably wouldn't be able to split at all. It was too green and too long. "Bam! One shot!" he yelled as it exploded under the axe. I found a gnarley log with a lot of knots in it. "Bam! One shot!" Suddenly I knew this old codger was serious.

I ran around trying to find every butt-ugly log I could get my hands on. Some weren't even sawed flat on top. Some still had limbs attached. Some were two feet long. It didn't matter. "Bam! One shot!" I asked him how he did it, begged him to tell me the secret. He just smiled, handed me the axe, and walked away.

That was a good day.

Once when I was 13, I laid on my unmade bed looking up at the bare bulb on the ceiling and listening to my parents and their guests downstairs. I started to get really bored and bothered by my surroundings. So I made my bed, cleaned up all of my junk, and vacuumed the floor.

Then I went down into basement and found a large area-rug, dragged it up to my room, and vacuumed that. I found an old coffee table down there and a lamp, too. So I cleaned those up and brought them to my room as well. At one point my mom asked me what I was up to and I said, "Cleaning my room," but nothing more than that.

When I got my room looking how I wanted it, I got on my bike and rode to the newsstand where I bought a big stack of comic books and a bag of licorice. I went back home where I spread my bounty out on my coffee table. I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and worked my way through all of the comic books and all of the licorice. It took a long time -- maybe a couple of days -- for anyone in my family to discover what I'd done.

That was a good day.