It rained all day yesterday. When it stopped, I went for an evening walk around the neighborhood. (Actually, I tried to go for a run, but experienced the evil cramp of Chinese take-out. Again.)
Following a different path than usual, I walked by a yard with a twisting tree and thick grass. Between one footstep and the next, I felt a brief impulse to run. The yard wasn’t well maintained or lush or must be hard to mow. It was simply full of opportunity.
I was nine years old and barefoot, playing baseball in wet grass, making paper boats to send down the gutters, building dams with dead pine needles, pulling frogs out of the sunken utility meters, climbing a tree, skinning my toes until they bled, crying over a fight with the neighbor girl, jumping off a dock to dive for pieces of concrete.
And then I was 30 again, walking, listening to Ben Folds, trying to wind down from an hour of frustrating refereeing at home during dinnertime. Feeling a little like a cliché.
**
Can you remember when a yard or a field or a tree or a path made your toes itch? When a full-tilt run felt like flying?
The heartbeat-quick impulse to play made me realize that as much as I always said I’d never grow up and never forget what it felt like to be a child, I did grow up. I turned unfair and oppressive, I became the voice of “no you can’t” and “put your shoes away.”
I’m a grownup.
Even when I don’t feel like one.
Even when I’m running away from home one gasping footstep and suburban block at a time.
(Only to turn the bend and hobble back, sweating and huffing and practical.)
I think this is why I ask, relentlessly, how my son’s day was when he’s away from me. I want to know what games he played, who he spoke to, where his imagination took him. Was the yard a jungle? Does he make-believe? What makes him laugh? What does he worry about? What does he want?
**
I’m reading this book about parenting and one of the first things it explained was that a child’s day belongs to him. It is one of the only things that truly belongs to him. We can’t—shouldn’t—take that away. We can only hope to be someone our children want to share things with, sometimes.
We can only hope for brief glimpses of the long-forgotten heart-racing potential of wet grass.
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