Things I Did When I Was A Kid….That My Children Never Will

1. I walked with my parents down a dirt road on election day where they entered a shed-like structure in the middle of a corn field and casted votes for our U.S. President.
2. I laid on my back in the middle of the Big Buffalo Creek and felt the wing feathers of a heron brush over me as he swooped for a landing in the shallow water.
3. I committed up to twelve hours a day to riding dirt bikes and four wheelers across the coutryside, which served as the four corners of my world.
4. I attended Friday night lights like a Catholic attends weekly Mass without fail.
5. I fed the cows every morning before school and every night after dinner.
6. I square danced on Saturday nights in real barns with livestock in the stalls and to the tune of live banjo bands.
7. I played basketball with my friends in my own barn.
8. Everything I ate came from our land or our barn or the pig pen or the chicken coop or the sheep pen.
9. I climbed silos to feed my need for a thrill.
10. I skated on a frozen creek from December to February against a bon fire built along the water’s edge.
11. I climbed a mountain to feel God’s grace.
12. I stopped to watch the sun set into the adjacent mountain crest.
13. Trick or treating was my dad driving me farm to farm for apples and bags of freashly popped corn.
14. I snowmobiled into late night hours on snow that stayed white on the ground all winter.
15. I climbed trees and imaged the world view from a high-rise apartment building in New York City, which was where I assumed Sesame Street was filmed.
16. I watched “The Waltons” every week night at seven.
17. I learned to drive with a manual clutch on my father’s tractor.
18. I met my friends on horses at a clearing along the creek on lazy afternoons.
19. I invested a critical pride in attending mt great-great-great grandfather’s alma mater, shared by generations across more than 200 years.
20. I gathered as a teenager with my friends at a pizza shop on the town square where football players wore varsity jackets, and cheerleaders mingled with field hockey palyers, and everyone knew everyone because this was our hometown, 36 miles from the nearest hospital, shopping mall, and movie theater, and 200 miles from where I now live.

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