A few months ago, there was a meme going around about how we, as children, were taught to stop, drop, and roll, whenever we caught on fire. This was a real lesson we were taught. We were also lined up in school hallways, told to sit down and cover our heads, as training for an atomic bomb attack.

As kids, we took this in stride. If grownups thought there was a risk of our being engulfed in flames or blown up by an atomic bomb, then they must know best.

Fortunately, most of us haven’t had to stop, drop, and roll, but I’ll bet some people have had to use this knowledge. I’m fairly sure, however, that nobody has recently sought out a school hallway, sat against the wall, and covered his or her head, since atomic bombs haven’t been dropped since 1945, 80 years ago.

What still worries me, though, is spontaneous combustion. At least once a year, a fireman would come to our classrooms and tell us about spontaneous combustion, and then make us watch a movie of cleaning products combusting underneath kitchen or bathroom sinks.

Saturday morning cartoons picked up where schools left off in terrorizing us. We regularly got to watch pianos fall out of high windows. They always landed on someone, or some rich, heavy woman’s dog, and squashed them. I did have a building part fall from a skyscraper in Manhattan directly in front of me, but it wasn’t a grand piano, so I just kept walking.

Also, banana peels. People were always slipping on banana peels. To this day, I have never seen a banana peel on the floor or ground. People were slobs, apparently, back in the day.

If you watched Roadrunner cartoons, then you were always on the lookout for roads that suddenly turned into cliffs, leaving you walking on air, until you weren’t. And anvils. We all worried about anvils falling on us. Again, I haven’t ever seen an anvil in real life. I wouldn’t even know what it was if one fell on my head.

But, most worrisome was quicksand. TV shows and cartoons featured a lot of quicksand. My friends and I were terrified that a mud puddle would suck us into the ground, along with any ponies or giraffes that happened to be wandering down our street. I still worry a lot about quicksand. Probably because some of the books I have read, and documentaries I have watched, have shown horses, elephants, and even bigger things being engulfed instantaneously. I’m even careful when I’m gardening. You just don’t know when quicksand could appear. Or quickmud.

Of course, there are real dangers out there: sinkholes that swallow cars, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, kids throwing rocks onto the highway from an overpass, cranberry sauce in a can. But, these things weren’t burned into our brains during our early, formative years, except for maybe that tornado that swept Dorothy’s house away to Oz, so we are aware of those dangers.

But, truthfully, we are much more concerned that Dudley Do-Right won’t turn up in time to rescue us, if Snidely Whiplash ties us to train tracks while a rapidly approaching train bears down on us.

_{Photo from the Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties segment of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends}