Apr. 15, 2003 - 12:31 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Childhood Re-visited

Back then play was the actual reality for us. When I was quite young, for several years the great ritual of play was finding a spot to make our little town. Might be a pile of dirt in someone's back yard that was not likely to be disturbed for awhile.

We would find a place, make our plans and scrape out roads, lanes and driveways, we would drive our Tootsietoy cars along the ways we had made and parked them in the driveways.

A good thing was that we could stand up and look down on our little civilization like gods and make plans from above.

We would build houses out of Popsicle sticks or big buildings from lath, we made fences with twigs, used small weeds of appropriate shape for trees for needed verdure. Occasionally we would have a corral with penned up beetles.

Various pieces of detritus from alley trash cans would make the neatest things. The stem out of a percolater would make a dandy light pole, other things taxed our imaginations but found their use. Our inventiveness and young imagination could conjure great things for our little world.

We could come back the next day and pick up from where we left off the day before. Our settlement went on and built up gradually as we went and there was little if any discord, we each had our own ideas but they blended well with other plans. It ran on our mutual imaginations.

Sometimes one of us would find a strangely shaped rock and it would morph into a castle or into a mountain outcrop like ones we often saw on our picnics in our mountains.

Once we had almost a whole summer vacation of play on a mound of dirt in my friends backyard. But by next vacation time the dirt had been used or hauled away and we had to find another spot.

Things like that only occupy a very short span of years, but when one is living them it seems to last ages. But I can now and again go to Childhood Re-visited . . . . . . . .

Blog