It isn’t some idyllic dream, and I’m not some quaint ethical illuminate. Rather I just wish for simpler times.  Times when playing Army Men and whittling a willow branch occupied a Saturday afternoon.  Or times when reading the comics on a Sunday morning meant all was right in the world.  That Beetle Bailey just made you laugh.  Times of picnics and watermelon or campfires and S’mores.  I long for those times.

 Perhaps the idea is antiquated.  Or the sentiment too obfuscatory in this age of French fries and I-pods.  Perhaps this whole exercise is just pleonastic excess.  I am likely just twisting in the wind.

(Property of Author)

Thoreau retired to Walden Pond; his transcendental vision to live deliberately in a simple way.  Fool!  He lasted mere months.  This isn’t some Dead Poet’s flash-in-the pan call for poverty and deliberation.  Thomas Carew proved the folly in that.  No, this is a call for plebeian courtesy and civility.  This is a call for some homespun hospitality and chocolate chip cookies with cold milk on the neighbor’s porch.  This is a plea for a few less I-Tunes and a few more serenades in the moonlight.  This is a call for 1950 rather than 1970 but with some Lynyrd Skynyrd thrown in for kicks and giggles.

A pipe dream?  Perhaps.  But today I watched my son kick the head off of a dandelion and do the Hokey-Pokey , and I envied him.  Somewhere and somehow I have lost the ability to eat an Oreo slowly and drink an Icee quickly.   I have forgotten the feel of mud between my toes and the thrill of skipping a rock across a placid lake and defeating my brother.  I have forgotten to live.