An Evening Well Spent

The dogs needed a walk and I suppose I did too.  I had been up til 4am with insomnia the night before and so I had been lounging around the house all day and had just let them out for quick potty breaks...but still they were asking to go for a walk.  “Okay, okay, okay… fine.  Let’s go.”  Since having overcome the inertia to get up and take the walk, I figured we might as well stay up and go somewhere.   After the dogs finished their business we headed down the mountain to the playground at Montreat…my new favorite place.  I go there to build cairns, my latest Inner Child-driven activity, but also to soak in the cold mountain water my still swollen injured-but-slowly-healing ankle.  I also find that it is a very meditative and therapeutic thing to do.  I found a good spot away from most of the people that were still lingering in the park after 6pm and hitched the dogs to a tree.  No time was wasted in climbing down the bank and into the creek.  Within minutes I had one, two, three cairns built.  The fourth one I struggled with a bit as the flat rock I was working with didn’t want to cooperate.  Finally, I managed to just barely balance said flat rock onto the point of a pyramid shaped rock, when a smallish stone jumped from my grip and flung itself directly onto the flat balanced one…bumping it off?.  Nope, the darn thing stuck like a magnet!  It didn’t wiggle and it never fell.  I couldn’t believe it!  My eyes practically popped out of my head and I let out a “WHOOP!” and immediately took a picture in case it didn’t last.  I swear sometimes these rocks really do have a mind of their own.  Or maybe some sort of Rock Faerie was hanging out lending assistance?  I bet that’s it.  

The Rock Faerie-Assisted Cairn with the stone that
jumped out of my hand and landed right on top

Whatever it was, willful rocks or rock faeries, I wanted more challenge, and so I thought I would give them a run for their money.  A large, triangle shaped rock presented itself to me and I stood it up on its point rather than its heavier, and easier, flat base.  Even after managing to get it to stay put, it took several tries to add more on top…but finally, Sweet Success!  Two more balanced on top and it’s done.

Precariously stacked

I was definitely proud of both of those two and very invested in their shelf life so I was a little apprehensive when right then two boys came over and struck up a conversation. 

Boys: “Did you make those?”

Me: “I did.”

Boys: “Whoa, that’s cool!  How did you do that?”

Me: “Well, have you ever played with blocks?”

Boys: “Yeah, but…”

Me: “Well its just like that only instead of playing with blocks, you play with rocks…and you just stack ‘em up.”

Boys: “Whoa…that looks hard.”

Me: “It is sometimes, but that’s why it’s fun. Try it!”

And they did, only I didn’t mean right here, right next to me…On the same set of base rocks I am using…I meant…ya know…OVER THERE! It’s a big creek ya know!!  I held my breath and bit my tongue and managed to keep my thoughts to myself...instead putting on the encouraging teacher face.

One boy wasn't at all interested and busied himself splashing about but the other boy took up residence inches from the cairn I built with the Rock Faerie’s help.  He bent over his work and his hair and his breath brushed my work.  My heart skipped.  I was certain he would clumsily knock it over and my vision of a whole field of cairns would be ruined. 

Boy: “Do you work here?”  He meant the Montreat Conference Center.

Me: “Nope.  I just play here, just like you.”  A big smile slowly took over his face while he comprehended that a grown-up was playing just to play.  The potential for him wreaking havoc had me a little bugged, but he finished his cairn, stood up proudly and romped off with the other boy.  Whew!  

The first child-built cairn inches from my Rock Faerie-assisted cairn

I was relieved that they came and went and left no destruction in their wake…I was pleasantly surprised and I knew my attitude needed an adjustment. I reminded myself that it’s just a pile of rocks and you already got the photos and it’s really no big deal.  Let it go…getting kids involved is a good thing...that’s what you want!  It is what I want, but sometimes my Overgrown 10 Year Old tendencies get the better of me and get in the way of rational thinking.  I continued working and more and more cairns came to be.   The more I worked, the more children came to be as well… It started with 3, and then 4 including the original two, back for more. 

Kids: “I like your castles.  How do you do that?  Why do you do that?  I wanna try that.  Can I try that?  How do you do it?  I wanna try that.  Is it hard?  It looks hard.  I can’t do that.  Can you show me how to do that?  Are they castles?  Can I help?  I wanna try.  Can I do it too?”  I heard from four kids all at once.

Again I said, “It’s just like stacking up blocks…Try it.  Just be careful…don’t knock the other ones down!”

I gave them no instruction, just lead by example.  In my own little world, I continued to focus on my work and take pictures…attitude fully adjusted. 

A little while later I stopped to take a minute to look around.  I was totally astounded!  A whole gaggle of children had come to play with me...no less than nine kids had gotten busy building.  If I had to guess, I would say they ranged in age from 6 to 14. Cairns were popping up all over the place and despite the huge presence of wiggly little bodies haphazardly walking between my precariously built cairns, not a single one was knocked over.  Not one. 

I was completely dumbfounded.  Not only had the number of kids shot up to epic cairn-building proportions but there were several parents looking on and one parent had actually joined in on the fun. She told me later that she had been watching me try to balance a rock on its edge and couldn’t fathom how I would get it to stay there and when I did, she knew she had to get in and try it too.  Yay!!  At this point my heart was exploding with delight as I stood back and watched the scene unfold.  Kids were building all over the place.  They were helping each other and encouraging each other and laughing together when their work would fall.  They helped each other rebuild.  Everyone was so focused and they were enjoying themselves so much that I couldn’t help but shake my head and smile in amazement.

 

The oldest girl of the bunch had built a tall cairn with large rocks.  I was so completely impressed with her determination to rebuild after her beautiful cairn repeatedly fell.  The countdown was on though…it was almost time for them to leave.  “I must finish it!” she belted out.  It fell again.  One last go at it and with the clock ticking…wouldn’t you know…the Force was strong in her just then because every rock held on tight.  Despite our suggestions not to push the envelope, push it she did with two small rocks to the top and she came out victorious.  The beaming look of pride and accomplishment on that girl’s face was enough to carry me through to next month!

It turns out the kids were from a local children’s home and the parent I had struck up a conversation with was their House Parent.  They were there celebrating the 8^th birthday of one of the kids with a late evening trip to the park.  Looking at how the whole interaction happened and how both of us had arrived late, I can’t help but think we were somehow guided to be there and that we will each leave a lasting mark on the other.  The House Parent commented to me that she won’t be able to get in a creek ever again without playing with the rocks.  That is the best thing I have heard all week!  Earlier, she had also said in a loud exclamation, that I had inspired the whole lot of them, but the truth is, they’re the ones that inspired me…and that field full of cairns is exactly what I got.  That and a warm fuzzy feeling. :)

Me and Johnny

Johnny and Me at age 6 or 7

When I was a kid, I loved to play with my many stuffed animals.  They all had names and jobs and homes complete with beds.  They went to school and came home with report cards.  There was Theodore, my most prized possession (that I still have),

Teddy the Bear, Ogilbee the Monkey, Snuffy the Monchichi, and Panda the Panda, just to name the ones that I can remember.  My best friend, Johnny and I would play “School” or “House” with these animals for hours and when we got bored the conversation sounded like this: “what do you want to do?”,  “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”,  “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”.  We’d go back and forth like that until we actually got bored enough that we just found something else to do and it was almost always outside.  Sometimes it was playing in my “yard”…if you could call it a yard.  Mostly my yard was a wood pile of cut logs to operate our wood burning stove.  It covered a HUGE chunk of space…If I had to guess I would say it was 8 feet wide by 40 or 50 feet long and 4 feet high.  As kids, we didn’t so much care really, as it became something else to play on...we even had races on it!  My yard was cool because there was this hidden spot beside the garage and next to the enormous wood pile that became the place where we built forts and clubhouses. We “borrowed” tools and wood from my dad's shop and found scraps in dumpsters with which several rooms and forts got built.  Our imaginations ran wild and we had elaborate pretend games where we became any number of people and took up any number of roles.  Sometimes it was pirates, sometimes it was astronauts, sometimes it was aliens, sometimes it was just regular people with regular jobs.  We had a rope swing as well and would swing between the fort and the wood pile before moving on to something else...like bikes!  Johnny and I would spend hours riding bikes, but not just ride them, pretend while riding them.  At my house, we played “Bank”.  There was a tree on Second Street, right beside my house that became the Bank.  We would ride around until one of us needed some money and the other would jump off a moving bicycle to operate said Bank.  It involved the exchange of some leaves or rocks or sticks standing in for money and when we were done, we would jump back on our bikes and be on our merry way.  At Johnny’s house, 7 houses down from mine, the game was similar only there we played “Gas Station”.  At his house we had the added benefit of an older sister who would sometimes play with us, until she got too cool for us, that is...and a few years later a younger sister.  Playing as a trio was waaaay better because two kids could be riding bikes and one operating the Station…the front stoop of their house.  Occasionally other neighborhood children would play too giving the Station lots of business and the attendant would always respond enthusiastically to the “fill ‘er up regular” request, pouring water from a watering can onto the back tire of the bike.  When we tired of bikes, there was the fabulous “Diggin’ Spot” at Johnny’s house.  This was a bare patch of dirt underneath an overgrown bush that was big enough to be called “The Climbin’ Tree”.  There in the Diggin' Spot we would use a push broom and create roads all over the dirt to drive Johnny's big, metal, yellow Tonka Trucks.  In the Diggin’ Spot, there was some sort of weird universe where both Tonka Trucks and Matchbox Cars peacefully co-existed and were operated by invisible drivers.  We would build miniature houses out of sticks and rocks and whatever else we could find and no house was complete without a stone walkway from driveway to front door and a dugout swimming pool…a small hole in the dirt.  The cars and trucks would leave their homes each “day” and drive around the intricate web of push-broom roads until it was time to go home, usually just a few minutes time.  Sometimes the Diggin’ Spot was actually used for digging…to China typically.  We never got there...we always hit water first.  We lived close enough to the South Shore of Long Island that just a foot or two down and water would fill the hole.  That was just fine with us…something else to play in and something to strive for…diggin’ for water replaced diggin for China.  The Climbin’ Tree was another endless source of entertainment.  We would climb to the highest branches and practice our monkey skills and from the lower branches, our jumping down skills.  We could climb up and keep watch on the neighborhood, my personal favorite.  For whatever reason, Johnny had this irrational fear of these big, mystical creatures he called “Teenagers”.  They would peruse the neighborhood on foot, and apparently in Johnny’s mind search out the younger kids to “beat up” although they never did.  Whenever they made their way down Smith Avenue, he could intuitively sense it and we would quickly retreat to the heights of the Climbin’ Tree or the House, whichever was closer at the time.  We would wait for them to pass by and we’d come out unscathed but a little shaken.  On the other side of Johnny’s yard was another overgrown bush…a mulberry bush.  At some point in the year it would be bursting with red berries.  We would climb it and later come down with faces and fingers stained purple and our dinners ruined.  At another neighborhood house we played SPUD and Tag and made up games reminiscent of CalvinBall from Watterson's famed strip.  It was play like this that inevitably made Johnny’s mom and later the older sister say, “You smell like the ‘outdoors!’”.  Ahhh…exactly as we liked it.  From these games we learned to problem solve, we learned social skills, we learned how to resolve our own conflicts.  We learned about life.

In Disney World...I think we were 10

And then something happened.  One year for Christmas, Johnny got a Nintendo Game System and my family got a computer.  It was all the rage.  Increasingly our hours were spent in front of the TV or computer screen, mindlessly hunting King Koopa or skillfully placing Tetris blocks with no other movement than the flick of a couple of thumbs.  Somehow we knew we were robbing ourselves of important play but we and everyone else we knew justified it with statements like “we're developing ‘hand-eye coordination'”.  We still played outside but not as much as the allure of the video game was far too great. 

Fast-forward to 2013 where all too often I encounter young children of the Video Game Age who seemingly possess little to no imagination skills.  Their toys are largely unplayed with.  They don’t know what to do with a set of blocks.  They have little concept of art supplies.  They make up few or no pretend games.  They simply don’t know how to play.  “How can that be?...play comes naturally” I hear people say.  Well, to that I would say that is does come naturally to children who have been allowed to or forced to be bored, as Johnny and I were when we were little.  But for children who have been saved from boredom and lazily entertained, essentially being raised on bright and flashy electronic games, I would say these children have been stripped of essential social skills that can only come from honest, imagination-driven play with other kids.  “Well I only let my child play ‘educational’ games”.  Really?  So we have gone from “hand-eye coordination” to “but it’s educational” to justify the behavior.  And it’s not just kids…people are letting their infants play on their smart phones and tablets and laptops and child-oriented game systems.  Seriously?  Do you realize what you’re doing?  At least Johnny and I had a chance to learn to play before video games ruled the world.  Many, if not most kids today never seem to get that chance.  You know how the smart phone numbs you out…it does me.  I am guilty as charged...think about what it's really doing to your kids.  The education you’re inevitably giving your children is a numbing LACK of being a free-thinking, well-adjusted and creative individual...but they WILL know their letters and numbers!  And of course they'll know how to operate electronics!  There have been extensive studies on this but people still turn a blind eye.  Uninhibited play is SO important...Your child's very childhood depends on it...they must be given room to breathe, room to scrape their knees.  I know…it’s not safe anymore, right?  But was it ever really safe?  Make them put down the phone.  Get them to turn off the PlayStation.  Send them outside.  Give them trucks and rocks and a mud puddle. If they tell you they are bored and they want to come in, wait them out.  WAIT THEM OUT! Give them time to find something else to do and hopefully they will get their hands dirty and come in smelling of the outdoors. It's good for them...and you!  It works for adults too...go out and play!!

  

Johnny turns 5

Me and Johnny and his little sister, Lizzie...we were 9 or 10, I think she was probably 3