Short, and quite amusing:
guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ … ishmongers
Martin.
My folks abandoned me in all sorts of places when I was little. I’m not sure if it was accidental though. Luckily, I always found my way back home.
Lucky for who, young ‘n’?
Uncle vic
The story is amusing but the comments - as is often the case on the Guardian site - are utterly depressing. I did something similar when I completely forgot my youngest about a year or so ago. I was taking the oldest two to school, and didn’t normally take our one year-old with me on the school run. For some reason (probably to give her mum a lie-in), that day, I did, and it wasn’t until I was waving goodbye to the other two that I remembered I’d brought her and had left her in the car outside the school. I don’t think I’ve ever ran so fast as I did back to the car that day. I had been on tired auto-pilot. I felt like a complete monster - what sort of father forgets a child? Unfortunately, I then made the mistake of going to the internet for the comfort of humorous stories of similar parental uselessness, but instead just found a load of moralising gits telling anyone who publicly admitted to such mistakes that they were terrible human beings not worthy of being parents, and stories of babies baked alive when left in cars. The same sort of pompous parent perfection seems to be malingering in the Guardian comment section. Right, better go and check we remembered to fetch our daughter back from ballet…
Find the movie Raising Arizona. Nick Cage and Holly Hunter (fairly early in both of their careers) are a childless couple who kidnap an infant, which Nick Cage’s character then forgets at a convenience store. Hilarious consequences ensue. (SPOILER: The kid is fine in the end.)
imdb.com/title/tt0093822/
Katherine
A friend of my parents once drove 60 miles to pick up his daughter from the ferry terminal. The ferry was delayed by half an hour or thereabouts, so he dropped in to say hello to a relative living nearby. After a quick cup of tea, he made his goodbyes, got in the car, and drove 60 miles home again. Eventually the poor daughter gave up waiting for him, found a payphone (this was back in the days before mobile phones) and rang home to say “where are you, Daddy?”. So he had to drive all the way back to the ferry terminal again.
When my children were little, I was always afraid that I might leave them somewhere or lose track of them somehow, so I used to count them obsessively when we were out and about. It sounds sensible enough in theory, until you realise that I am far from being the Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe, and there were only two of them!
I pretty much make it a rule never to read comments. They are almost invariably cretinous because the people who write them rarely take the trouble to think things through. This is the Facebook world, everybody writes, and it only matters that you have an opinion. Whether it is a sensible opinion doesn’t matter – it’s my opinion, so it must be better than yours. And other people’s feelings don’t exist …
Cheers, Martin.
PS: if you want to find out just how weird human memory is, read some of the work of Elizabeth Loftus. And if you want to discover just how faulty human perception is, find some video clips of the experiments of Simons and Chabris.
Well, I guess I’ll pretend that my opinion matters.
Some of my best memories are from getting 'left behind" by the parent. Back in the '70s the apparent obligation adults had for lost children was to buy them ice-cream. And if there wasn’t an actual ice-creme shop they could carry a cone from, then they brought a half gallon tub with plastic spoons. My favorite was when they person would show up with the ice-creme maker and make it on the spot. It would become a spontaneous street party.
The funniest was when I was left at factory with a museum attached. I had seated myself on the front steps waiting the return of my parents when, apparently, the entire town noticed me there at the exact same moment. There was a wad of folks carrying cones from the local ice-creme parlor waiting to cross the street. They were all looking at each other trying to figure out why someone else could possibly need two cones. Let it suffice to say that when the family returned for me, not only was I fully to bursting with ice-creme, there was enough left over for my sister.
I don’t know if it is/was like that “up here” above Mason-Dixon. I’d like to think it is/was.
I think one of the most famous “left behind” scenarios was this one.
One for the new generation…
imdb.com/title/tt2308733/plotsummary
Because this is EXACTLY what the movie industry needs right now.
I wasn’t exactly left anywhere as a child, but my parents did forget to pick me up from school once. I was still there at 9PM.
They actually had dinner before they picked me up.
I have stored this one up for when they are old and no longer able to look after themselves.
My parents left me behind on many occasions. The most notable was being left behind in Broome (we lived in Melbourne at the time). If you are not familiar with Australian geography, it’s a little bit like being left in Seattle if you live in Miami, but where Seattle is a small pearl fishing town on the edge of a desert.
Luckily they remembered after they got back to the campsite. In the meantime, Jaysen will be pleased to know, I had ice cream. 
It is almost makes you wish the parents didn’t come back, doesn’t it?
Why “almost”?
Does that ice cream thing stop after a certain age? I’m sure I could argue that my parents have left me on my own today.
Apparently. My wife left me at the ice cream shop and not a single person took pity on me.
Your wife left you?
Bloody hell, what flavour did you order to make that happen?
The called it “excessive vocalization of displeasure with sprinkles”.
…in a waffle cone