One big difference about living with my dad in 1977 was doing manual labor. I had to do plenty of it while living with my mom and stepfather, but I hated every minute. Working with my dad was fun. We used a fireplace to heat the unfinished basement we lived in, and every weekend, we went out and got wood for it. I learned how to use a chainsaw to cut down a tree, and how to split wood using an axe. Pretty cool for a 12-year-old!

But the fun part of cutting wood for our family was how we hauled it. We would venture back into the woods on Peggy’s property on snowmobiles, and we chained an inverted car hood to the back to one of them to use as a sled. We would stack the wood on the inverted car hood and haul it back to the house. For the next trip back to the woods, it was game on, as we boys would take turns clinging to the car hood for dear life as another would make sharp turns at high speeds to throw the rider off.

One weekday in January, it was bitter cold, nearly 10 degrees below zero. The wind chill made it far worse, like 25-30 below. Winds were fierce and snow was blowing horizontally by the time it reached the ground. School was called off, and it would have been a perfect day to huddle by the fireplace. The problem was that we were completely out of wood. It was one of the coldest Januarys on record and we had gone through all of our firewood by Wednesday. With no choice in the matter, it was off to the woods, just my dad and me, since my step-brothers stayed with their dad during the week. I can tell you with certainty that I’d never been that cold before, and I haven’t been that cold since. It was the kind of cold that made your lungs hurt when you breathed. We brought back four loads of wood on the car hood, but without the hijinks of the games we boys usually played. I realized later that this was actually a matter of survival. The physical activity of splitting the wood usually kept me warm enough to take off the top of my snowsuit, but not that day.

For the first time in my young life, I had a real sense of pride in the labor that I had done. I wasn’t just mowing a lawn or vacuuming a house. I was helping to provide heat and comfort for my family on one of the coldest days in memory.

When a stranger offers an opinion about my arrested development or emotional immaturity because I still enjoy the trappings of childhood in the form of comics or cartoons and the like as an adult, I just think about this day when I was 12 years old and I let them ramble in their ignorance. They have no idea what I’ve experienced in my life, and frankly, I generally don’t care enough about them to take the time to explain how wrong they are. The only person I ever need to convince is me.