Back To The Days Of Christopher Robin

When I was a kid we used to play outside when the weather was nice and sometimes even when it wasn’t. I remember going sledding on days that the sky looked like steel and it was so cold that our fingers felt the way the sky looked. There were other days the we splashed in puddles in our custom mud drenched shoes and danced under the reaching limbs of trees with leaves swirling above and below our feet. The best were summers though.

When I was a kid there wasn’t a video game in existence that could rival the joy of careening downhill on a bicycle with no hands. No one had cable except people with money and Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney Channel were still twinkles in the eyes of some chrome encrusted board rooms so the allure of television couldn’t stand up to the excitement of the outside world. We had sprinklers to dash through, balls to toss and races to run. We were alive and young.

We were hot and thirsty too. Since our mother had bad asthma and we lived in an old moldy house we got air conditioning. When the heat became oppressive in the afternoons we could retreat indoors for a quick glass of water and the refreshing breeze that wafted from the floor vents. With 4 kids (the twins not being there just yet) constantly in and out of the house with children’s innate ability to forget orders seconds after they’ve been hollered, our mother spent quite a bit of time yelling out the same phrase over and over again as we dashed through the door which was habitually left open.

“In or out! I don’t care which just pick one and close the door!”

I’ve been thinking of those words a lot lately. It’s funny how we find life truths in tiny specks of memory from our youth. We grow older and we mature but the bottom line with anything is the same as when we were kids. We can have it hot or cold but not both. We have to pick one and once we do then it’s time to close the door.

So today what will you decide? In or out.