The fragment is also a humorous retrospective account of his interactions with other children, from their favorite pastimes (trapping flies with the horologion) to Creangă's crush on Smărăndița and the misuse of corporal punishment by a jealous peer tutor.

Creangă recounts his early disappointment with school activities and appetite for truancy, noting that his motivations for attending were the promise of a priest's career, the close supervision of his mother, the prospects of impressing Smărăndița, and the material benefits of singing in the choir.

Nică follows the path of transhumance and is assigned to the care of shepherds, but he himself falls ill with what the narrator claims was cholera, and, upon returning home with a high fever, is instantly cured with a folk remedy of vinegar and lovage.

Following Smaranda's indication, Nică believed that blond-haired boys such as himself could invoke sunny weather by playing outside on a rainy day, that various dangers could be cursed away, and that marking the human body with soot or mud meant protection against the evil eye.

He recounts his participation in the customs related to Saint Basil's feast (modern New Year's Day), fashioning a pig's bladder into a rattle and joining buhai players in celebrations as noisy as to irritate the settled villagers.

The story also shows Nică greedily consuming all the milk his mother leaves out for souring and trying to blame it on the strigoi spirits, or bothering Chiorpec the shoemaker to the point where the aging man would punish him by covering his face in terpene.

Met with much hostility by his father's employees when he ultimately reaches his destination, the boy makes his way back to the hoopoe's lime tree and easily ties up the exhausted bird, hiding her in the attic of his house, where it no longer can sing.

After a few paragraphs in which he focuses on the serendipitous nature of such outcomes, which serve him to avert producing further damage, Creangă moves on to describe his first employment: pulled out of school by Ștefan, the boy is enlisted in the village's textile trade, and becomes a spinner.

After recounting the superstitious rituals performed by children during such escapades (such as dripping water from one's years onto stones, of which one is God's and the other the Devil's), the narrator describes being caught in the act by Smaranda, who punishes him by taking hold of all his clothes and leaving him to return naked through the village.

It offers additional detail on the general history of Humulești, an account leading as far back as the Polish–Ottoman War of 1672–1676, and briefly mentioning the passage of Austrians on their quest to find the beautiful princess Natalia (events which the writer claims to have witnessed himself).

His statement serves to introduce the next period in Nică's life: his reenlistment in school, which this time around is a new institution founded on the orders of Moldavian Prince Grigore Alexandru Ghica, and presided upon by theologian Isaia "Popa Duhu" Teodorescu.

Parts of the text however insists on the teaching methods employed by the seminary, which involve learning by heart and chanting elements of Romanian grammar or entire works of commentary on the Bible, and lead the narrator to exclaim: "A terrible way to stultify the mind, God alone knows!"

The narrator sketches portraits of his friends, based on their defining abilities or moods: the old man Bodrângă, who entertains the group with flute songs; Oșlobanu, a man of the mountain, can lift and carry a cartload of logs on his back; the handsome David, whose early death is attributed by the writer to excessive effort in learning; the irreverent Mirăuță, who taunts Jewish businessmen with antisemitic poems, but spends little time on schoolwork; Trăsnea, who can only learn grammar by memorizing the entire textbook, and who is much upset by the recent replacement of Romanian Cyrillic in favor of a Latin alphabet; Zaharia "Gâtlan" Simionescu, a flatterer who can persuade adults to tolerate his daring gestures; Buliga, a priest given to drinking and merrymaking, who is depicted blessing the group's parties.

However, the final such attempt produces a scuffle between the two camps, so loud that neighbors mistaken it for a fire or an attack by the Austrian troops stationed in Fălticeni (a military presence concomitant to the Crimean War and a Moldavian interregnum).

[4] Creangă would at times read the individual texts, like his other writings, in front of a public constituted from the members of Junimea literary society (some of whom were Iacob Negruzzi, Vasile Pogor and Alexandru Lambrior).

[8] The product of Creangă's work is noted for its relatively isolated linguistic context, often relying on obscure elements in the Romanian lexis by adopting colloquial, antiquated, Moldavian dialectal or specifically rural speech patterns.

"[9] Much critical attention retrospectively focused on the measure of difference between, on one hand, the originality and subjectivity in Ion Creangă's first-person narrative and, on the other, their debt to the affixed conventions of traditional literary discourse.

"[10] Assessing that the book adapts the characteristics of oral tradition and frame narratives leading back to Renaissance literature, Călinescu also saw them mainly as a testing ground for the author's soliloquy and an illustration of his abilities as a raconteur.

"[11] In contrast, Călinescu's contemporary and colleague Tudor Vianu argued: "The character in [Creangă's] stories, novellas and anecdotes recounts himself Childhood Memories, a work so not like folk narratives in its intent.

"[12] In reference to the similarities between the text and the Renaissance tradition, Vianu also noted: "The idea of fictionalizing oneself, of outlining one's formative steps, the steady accumulation of impressions from life, and then the sentiment of time, of its irreversible flow, of regret for all things lost in its consumption, of the charm relived through one's recollections are all thoughts, feelings and attitudes defining a modern man of culture.

In a 2000 article, essayist and novelist Norman Manea builds on Călinescu's conclusions to assert that the "stable", "serene" and "solar" narrator of Childhood Memories "does not even exist outside [his] unveiling of an enchanted, traditional, rigorous concreteness".

"[14] Writing in 2008, literary historian Nicolae Manolescu argued that the Memories volume evidenced "Creangă's genius", which was linked to "the naïve and carefree register of childhood", and therefore implicitly superior to all his other works in prose.

[17] He contrasts this perspective with another first-person fragment: the opening of Adventures in Immediate Unreality by the interwar novelist Max Blecher, which directly plunges the reader into a universe of modernist uncertainty, subjectivity and suffering.

[19] Creangă's biographer Dan Grădinaru believes the narrative to reveal Nică as "a loner", and, using psychoanalytical terminology, sees the entire volume as proof of "dethronement complex" and an excessive focus on maternal love.

"[21] Djuvara used the fragment to discuss the structure of Romanian rural society in Moldavia, made relatively wealthy by textile enterprises, in comparison to its counterpart in the southern region of Wallachia, concluding: "if the mud hut villages of the Danube flood plain are to be taken into account, one finds himself in a different country.

"[22] Folklorist and critic Marcu Berza took the book as a record of Romanian folklore, its varieties and its reception, noting that the episode in which buhai players are chased away by angered householders shows that some peasants preferred a quieter celebration to what was in effect an echo of pagan fertility rites.

Z. Ornea finds the narrator's outbursts against the practice of learning by heart to innovative choices Creangă made in his own career as an educator, and especially his support for Titu Maiorescu's theories on reforming the local curriculum through institutional modernization and professionalization.

[31] Some of these were leading Romanian graphic artists: a 1959 volume with 14 drawings by Eugen Taru (the originals of which form a permanent exhibit at Creangă's memorial house in Humulești)[32] and another one with plates by Lívia Rusz, in both black-and-white and color.

Creangă's work in general and his memoirs in particular have influenced Moldovan Postmodernist novelist Leo Butnaru in writing Copil la ruși ("A Child to the Russians"), which is set to the backdrop of 1950s' Russification in the Moldavian SSR.