Kool-Aid Kid

I was a Kool-Aid kid.

As a child, I was just as comfortable reading books in the shade as I was building rock dams across the creek in my backyard. I was all about being barefoot, bicycles, bedtime stories, swing sets, sandboxes, and sidewalk chalk, and the tune of “Do your ears hang low…” echoing through the neighborhood as the Ice Cream Man made his warm-weather rounds.

I loved to explore and experiment. I would burn ants with magnifying glasses, search for crawdads in rocky crevices, and see how long it would take to fry eggs in the Summer heat on blacktop. If I had been a cat, curiosity would have killed me nine million times over. I employed the scientific method before I even knew what it was.

In third grade, I had a teacher who loved poetry, and I feel in love with it, too.
In third grade, I wrote for a class assignment:
A butterfly is not fairly big when it sits on a swaying twig.
A butterfly has nice designs. They flutter about, as if making invisible lines.

I was fascinated with the world around me, and fascinated by others expressing their feelings and experiences of it, and fascinated with expressing the way I felt about it. The beginning of a love affair with the written word.

I loved to draw, and I was a mapper. I created detailed colored, aerial views of Tacoma Drive, Sundilla Court, Tacoma Creek, the First Desert, the Second Desert, the Fifty Foot Drop, and innumerable cool, shady trails, all mapped on the crisply lined pages of composition notebooks. Mixed in with the poetry, of course.

On Summer days and nights, I liked to sit and listen. The whirring of crickets and frogs would hypnotize me for hours as I sat there slowly pumping my legs on the swing set in the shade of the big Tulip Tree- the “Batman Tree,” I called it, basing its name on the shape of its leaves. I remember breathing in deep, content breaths, thinking about how happy the world made me. There’s nothing like the smell of honey suckle and freshly cut grass, or the smell of water from a sprinkler through a rubber hose warmed by the sun.

The freedom of Summer was exciting, but man, man did I love Fall. I used to bury myself in ridiculously large piles of leaves and let myself sink to the bottom, trying my best to disregard the granddaddy-longlegs crawling slowly over my face, just breathing in. Just smelling. The smell of Fall, and it’s crisp, cool air. The “In-between time,” I told my dad.

Dad had a garden. I remember the sound of the snap of a raw green bean, the shuck of an ear of corn, the “ppfffftt” of spitting a watermelon seed off of the maroon picnic table, hoping it’d make some watermelon vines grow the next year.

I loved feeling the wind rushing past my face on my bicycle, as I ceased my ferocious peddling and let myself fly down the big hill, narrowly avoiding the loose gravel that contributed to most of the scars I still have on my knees.

As kids we were kings and queens of the hill. Civil Engineers and Ecologists. We were Herpetologists, Entomologists, Physicists, Medical Doctors and Nurses, Geographers, Chemists, Geologists. Poets and painters, armed with crayons. I think we all start out as everything, jacks of all trades, building dams and keeping cats from bothering chipmunks. In our childhood curiosity we study reptiles, amphibians, and insects. With our tricycles, bicycles, rollerblades, and wagons, we study centripetal force, inertia, friction. We’d help carry the victims of childhood accidents to moms with rubbing alcohol, band-aids, and snacks. We knew the lay of the land better than we knew how to tie our own shoes. We knew that if the water captured the light just right, you could make a rainbow in a sprinkler. We felt the grit of the mud from the creek bed in our hands, and watched it swiftly race downstream, making tortoises of the larger pebbles and boulders.

To a kid, a tiny creek is the Rio Grande, the Mighty Mississippi, the Amazon, the Nile, the Ghanges.

If we learn best by being, then I think we can learn a lot from our younger selves. We knew a lot then, but didn’t know it was knowledge. There was always something to anticipate, to read, to understand, to explore. Experience was the best teacher we ever had.

Petrus Severinus, a Sixteenth-Century Danish Alchemist once said, “Go, my Sons, burn your books and buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth... Observe and experiment without ceasing, for in this way and no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the true nature of things."

I think he’s right (except for the whole “burn your books” part). ;)

(Written August 9th, 2008, in Columbia, SC)