Reflecting...

As a kid I always wanted a treehouse....

A few of my friends had them over the years and there always sort of magical, special places. You could get away from mom and dad for a while. It was an elevated fortress, a sanctuary, a hiding place where secrets were told. There were secret, sacred clubs that oaths were sworn to. We wrote messages in code that only other members could decipher. And even the dreaded signing in blood after cutting your finger, which then was comparable to chopping off your arm with a dull axe.

It was Mark Twain's Huck and Tom come to life.

I remember climbing up Garret Davis's rope ladder into his tree house in his folks back yard. He was my best friend in the second grade. We spent hours upon hours up in that tree playing and whispering things to each other that only little kids will confide with one another. I still to this day remember the feeling of the breeze blowing through the little window as we sat and ate Vienna sausages out of a can and imagined we were on safari and that hungry lions were prowling around under our fort, high in the trees.

On other days it was marauding tribesmen, or Nazi soldiers we were staving off with our plastic cap pistols. Some days the ground below was reed filled water filled with huge crocodiles that we would have to ford to get to the back door of his house without being eaten.

I miss that mentality I had as a child. The ability to fantasize, and play, and just be in the moment. I wonder where it went to? Was it schooling, or employment, or just being around "grown ups" whose hearts were dead? Did our hearts die being around them?

I think it was a contagious mental disease that we caught from them. Our open minds became closed. The rules and regulations slowly crushed the life force out of all of us. Our dreams and fantasies dried up and became crumbling pillars of salt. We conformed. We submitted to the authority of universities, employers, the military, and worst of all society. We really became Pink Floyd's "Brick In The Wall". And we lost it. The light died...

I really don't know... But I hate what I/we have become.

But I do know that I'd really love to have it back. That magic that we had as children. The ability to make a few sheets of plywood and some tar shingles nailed up into a scrawny oak tree a special place. A sacred place. The freedom to just shoulder a pack and head off into the woods with a few cans of chili, and a bb gun. Unencumbered by the shackles that our society places on our feet and hands as soon as we enter the job market.

Just sayin'...........