Our daughter asked me, “What about being a child do I miss the most?” Good question. I was fortunate enough to have a tremendously fulfilling childhood, full of love, support, kindness, surrounded by family, and the freedom to roam and ramble with friends from sunup to sundown. With friends, or solo. Sometimes a kid needs a good solo expedition.

I am also fortunate enough to have all those things in adulthood, but the childhood version of roaming and rambling with friends in and around Lignite is probably what I miss most. I enjoy roaming and rambling with friends in adulthood as well, but there’s a few more tethers attached to the adult version. Mostly physical tethers. You may walk into a roam and a ramble, but you’re going to limp home. So it goes.

Riding bike, playing ball, arguing, laughing, roughhousing, exploring, just doing whatever…whenever, with no thought of what to do next. That’s what I miss. “What to do next” just happened in its own time, and never took anything away from whatever was occupying us at the time. In the moment, present with friends, very little thought…just responding to one another’s whims. Us knuckleheads had no shortage of whims.

Reminds me of a passage from An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki, “No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master.  Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving a cold corpse to be embraced.”

Roaming and rambling fueled by the whimsy of a pack of feral knuckleheads in Toughskins jeans. Zen masters. Glorious.

All of us Zen masters forced out of our flow of life simultaneously, three times a day, when the siren by the fire hall sounded at noon, six, and nine. Begrudgingly, but dutifully, responding, like a pack of dogs to our mothers' command of, “Come home when the siren blows.” Scattering for lunch, supper, or worst of all, bedtime, and reconvening wherever…whenever. Until one day we didn’t.

I often wonder what day that was? The final time the siren scattered us? If I had known, I would have had my mom take a picture of us. The pack of feral knuckleheads in Toughskin jeans…Zen masters on the verge of being washed out of their childhood flow of life. If I had known, but none of us ever do.

When I close my eyes, I can sort of see us, but it’s like looking through a dusty windowpane. The figures are there, I can see them moving, I can hear them laughing and arguing, but I’m not sure who they are, and I’m afraid that wiping the windowpane will make the siren blow.

I’ll leave the knuckleheads be. I’ll let them be Zen masters for a little while longer. Let them wear out, rather than grow out, of their Toughskins.

What about being a child do you miss most?