Blogsville

Blogs are like little villages where the people gather at some central location, a watering hole or a town square or maybe just some bar or café where all the locals hang out. And where is "out"? Outside of one's dwelling place, that personal space we call home? Oh, please. I really don't want to visit that idea of home again; it's a place that's eluded me for years, maybe even generations. And here I am talking to myself again, self to self. But that's okay, because you are doing the same thing: coming to another person's blog to see what that "self" has to say to your own self.

This morning I am compelled to look back at my childhood and accept the fact that there were things I was not afforded the opportunity to do. Rather than look back with regret at opportunities missed, instead I want to examine what did happen in light of what I was afforded. As a child, I saw the world through child's eyes. So did you. Then we grew up into adults and began taking more responsibility for our lives. As children, we relied on our parents or guardians for most of our needs: food, shelter, and other sustenance. As adults, we either wing it on our own or we form families of our own. We marry, or not. We have children, or not. Regardless of these decisions, there is a person inside of us who is the same "little" person who existed inside of us back then, in childhood.

This little person is the one I want to get to know again, if at all possible. That unsullied innocent wide-eyed child who was surprised and delighted by so many things. The child my mother remembers riding in the grocery cart at eighteen months old, looking at a can of blueberries on the shelf and crying out, "Blue peas! Blue peas!" I had never seen blue peas before, and how exciting that must have been in the world of one so innocent.

Where did she go, that child? And what about the delight she used to feel at such revelations as the idea of, imagine that, blue peas! Am I even capable of that kind of excitement anymore, or has cynicism become so entrenched in my daily life that nothing really fazes me anymore?

I miss that kind of childlike enthusiasm and want it back!