On the idealization of childhood in Daydreaming on the Porch

"...I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood. And not only this is true, but as far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence. My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I Iost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me...."

Henry David Thoreau Journals

I can still remember with both great fondness, and, the regret of passing time, those years of my childhood when we children played with such abandon and joyousness, innocence if you will, it the backyards and woods of my youth. I remember running a lot and laughing and tumbling on the ground, and many other joys of being outdoors after school and on weekends in the last 50s and early 1960s, the years I was 8-12. The days were long and adventurous when you are a kid and particularly when you were a kid in the pre-Internet age. There was TV, of course, but my mother didn't let us watch too much of it, hence all the time we spent outdoors under the big hackberry trees in summer, building little Western towns with sheets of plywood, setting up Old West saloons (we watched Bonanza and Palladin, etc.) and using wagons as stagecoaches. I was always tall for my age and I guess stronger because of it, and ended up pulling the "stage" a lot. We watched "Mighty Mouse" cartoons on Saturday morning, and afterward flew around the yard with towels for capes. There were no responsibilities other than school, and in summer that was just a distant memory in the hot afternoon of mid-July.

I think Thoreau was right about how in adulthood we lose our senses, in a manner of speaking, because we become encumbered with layers of worry and responsibility, duties and obligations, bills and finances, work and the advanced neuroses of co-workers, friends from years past who don't keep up with us and disillusion us, caregiving for aging parents, and wondering what retirement will be like. All this is what dims our capacity for the unfettered enthusiasm and fun we were once capable of having as children. How well Thoreau expresses it: "[I] inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction." Today our bodies and minds are both weary with age and the relentless drumbeat of adult worries and angst. Childhood now seems to me like a previous existence, a previous body, and a time of innocence we can only imagine today. Of course there were always the bullies and mean kids when we were growing up and we wanted to run away from home at times, but at least we felt secure in the knowledge that we didn't have to solve all our problems by ourselves.

Now in my early 60s, I romanticize childhood and that is ok. I'm not forgetting all the problems and pain I suffered through as an adolescent, but in the peak years of childhood, life for the most part was a golden field to play in. While it lasted.