This week has been a week of very powerful emotions. I had a birthday, which always puts my thoughts to my own lived life. I turned 46 years old on Wednesday. A good friend of mine has a birthday this coming week. He would have been 47 years old this coming Wednesday, but he died of cancer about a week ago. This friend of whom I speak was a childhood friend. We played ball together with a group of boys every day after school and every day in the summer. As we got older he drove me to high school and back every day. We drove around looking for fun on the weekends. It was a magical time to be a kid/teen. As we married and moved on to our own families and careers we didn’t keep in contact well. It had been 20 years since we spoke, but like all childhood memories, our friendship was as vivid as those summer days were magical.
The summer days consisted of chores at home then hop on your bike to a friend’s house. Eventually you get a posse together and do whatever fell into your lap that day. Saturday mornings the posse rode their mountain bike to my house and we threw everyone and their bikes in the back of the pickup. My mom would drop us off at the trail and we would ride for a couple hours. Those predictable Saturdays mornings were the only things really scheduled, although the “schedule” was never really discussed.
Times move on and change. It seems the older I get the faster things change. The last 2 years has changed the world more than my entire lifetime. Will my own children reminisce about their childhoods as wonderful and magical. I sure hope so, but it seems so different than my own experience. They having scheduled so much it seems spontaneity has no room. Adventures if they can be found seem staged and without risk. I am likely just being a curmudgeon. The answer I believe is not to give your kids adventures, but give them freedom. Send them off, kick them out of the house for a while, let them get hurt and hungry, and enjoy watching a hungry boy eat when he comes home.
After the funeral service the posse hung out around my friend’s grave and talked about old times for about an hour. We could have talked for days about all the things we did. One story led to another and then another. The interesting thing is that we didn’t think we were living a magical childhood or as adventurous teenagers, but just normal kids doing normal things. It is the moving on that make it seem so magical and adventurous. It really was larger than life, impossible to attain in this life, yet it existed, it happened.
Oh, man - well said. I feel this way too!
I'm sorry for the loss of your friend. Regardless of having dropped out of contact decades ago, I'm sure he's sorely missed. I hope his family is surviving and can thrive eventually.