What do you miss most about being a "kid"? No, seriously consider the question. Children live very different lives now than they did even just ten years ago when I was a wee one. It's strange to think about, but when you do it becomes quite eerie. I see children nowadays, and I don't recognize them as having a childhood--at least, not in the sense that I define it.

As a child I can recall running around outside for long periods of time with little supervision. My brother and I would traipse up and down our street, we would race bikes and roller skates, we would climb trees without our parents wary eyes constantly upon us. We were left alone to be children. And we were exactly that--children. We wrestled and beat each other up and got into neighborhood wars with the other children on our street. When one of us would get a boo-boo we would both run home, one of us crying the other almost as hysterical. We taped cards to the spokes of our bicycle wheels and pretended we were motocross champions. We climbed trees and suddenly we were the rulers of the world or spies on a secret mission. In our backyard, we explored jungles and swam through the Amazon. We had wild horse buggy races on our swing. We were gymnasts on the porch. With the other kids on our street we put on shoes and charged everyone a penny to see. We formed secret societies and played Chicken and stole branches off our neighbors trees to be swords or whips. Individually we poked at ant piles and picked flowers and fell asleep staring at the clouds. That wasn't that long ago--was it?

It doesn't seem so to me. Just ten years--a decade. But when you use that fancy of a word, suddenly it seems like forever, especially when you look around at children today. I see first graders with cell phones, nine-year olds with I-pods. The children's section holds trendier and skankier clothes than my whole closet. Instead of growing up sweating outdoors and up a tree, these kids are growing up inside plugged into the television and computer. Even ten-year olds have laptops!

How did this happen? How did kids go from being, well, kids to being mindless drones in an air-conditioned collective? Instead of using their imaginations to turn one simple toy into twenty, they now have the twenty, and they all come with flashing lights and three superfluous functions. Instead of learning through investigation, they are learning through regurgitation. How does that work? How did it become this?

But the question has been asked dozens of times by dozens of people who are certainly more qualified than I am. And yet, we still have no answers. Just more questions, all bubbling down to one: Where did childhood go?

There is no answer. It's just the way the world is changing. Where once a child was happy playing with a stick, another generations ahead was happy playing with Lincoln Logs. Another, even further along is enjoying his or her hand-held gaming system that allows anyone to completely customize their house with however many hot tubs they want. It's simply the way the world turns.

So then are we destined to lose sight of that delicate and intricate machine that brought us both the Golden Gate Bridge and the New World Symphony? Is imagination a lost cause that we best forget about as quickly as possible? Should we resign ourselves to a world of grey boxes and computer-run lives? There's no way to know. The only thing that we can be sure of is that we each have the power to choose how we interact with the world--through a plasma screen or through our senses.


....bah. I miss being a kid. I hate that nowadays I ask someone to play hopscotch with me and I get nothing but a weird look back. Why is it so weird that I like kids' games? They're fun and they're what made me who I am--why should I just abandon them like yesterday's expired produce? I want to learn to double-dutch. I never could figure out how to do that--I'm just not coordinated enough. Bah....and four square. Oh my god do I want to play four square. Blech...but now I'm sad and missing Ben because that is like OUR GAME. We rock at four square--totally kicked ass on choir tour that one year.

Sigh....I miss childhood.