It Is Such a Beautiful Day

This morning, I saw some children waiting for the school bus…

It is such a beautiful morning and the children look so happy. It makes me pause for a moment and remember a time in my life, when I was a child and I waited for the school bus on a morning just like this. The sun peeking up over the horizon, the smell of approaching autumn in the air, the anticipation of football games, apple cider, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the first snowflakes; the wonderful feeling that after school I would be outside with my friends with the rest of the day to do whatever I wanted.

The innocence of children is quickly corrupted by the world and at some point in time we all lose the child that lived inside us – or it seems to me that most of us do. Today as I watch the children waiting for the bus it occurs to me that my child inside hasn’t really died and that this makes me different; this is what makes me rebellious and unusual – some would say I can be bellicose. But I have a child’s heart. That is to say, I have a soft heart; I have a heart of gold.

When you look at the world through the eyes of a child as an adult it makes for an odd porridge, a strange concoction of feelings and emotions. The child struggles with the man – sometimes the child wins, and sometimes the man wins.

I never really feel part of anything because some medical experts would say I’m “conflicted”.

I always feel an outcast when I’m in a group of adults. Looking at these school children waiting for the bus I feel part of me wanting to run over to them, grab a football and start choosing sides for a game of touch football in some old deserted, grassy field.

I can hear the windows breaking as I throw the football, a la Joe Montana, over the street and into Mrs. Maloney’s front window. We all run away in fear that we will be discovered — but it isn’t a bad fear – for it was just us, a bunch of kids having an innocent game of football on one of the many warm and sunny, late-summer days.

My dad will make me pay for that window if I’m found out. My friends though, true and loyal, won’t rat me out. I’m safe as long as Mrs. Maloney didn’t see us running away.

The children are smiling and laughing, I can hear their giggles – such sweet music to my ears. It touches my heart and I want to linger and watch them get aboard the school bus – but I cannot. I don’t have time. The man inside me has things to do and places to go – and too much on the agenda to waste time on this beautiful late-summer morning.

But, to be honest, I’m mostly busy contemplating innocence lost.

As I start to drive away I stop. I think about things. I watch the children waiting for the school bus, and I really think that we are all children – children of the universe. We are all minute specks of starlight, flickering for a fraction of a millisecond in the unbounded dark cosmic ocean of time; we are as meaningless and meaningful as anything and everything else. We matter not at all, and we are all that matters.

It’s been a good morning. Autumn, though a few weeks away, is floating delicately in the air; but it is still summer, waning though it may be. The increasing slant of the sunlight, the more southerly sunsets, the leaves, once green and youthful, grayer and more tired, are all signs that summer is swiftly nearing its end, and that autumn will creep in slowly, softly – and gently – so much so that we’ll have to check the calendar to make sure it really is autumn. It won’t be long though and the trees will put on their colorful, festive coats and paint the landscape with an almost surreal beauty, and  we will wake as if from a dream and wonder where in the world the summer went.

Time flies faster the older I get. Seasons, which seemed to last forever when I was a child, pass so quickly now. And I realize that I am now in the autumn of my life – but the child inside me keeps drawing me back giving me teasing glimpses of what I once was. I won’t go gently into that good night. My child inside won’t let me. But trying to gracefully surrender the things of youth is so difficult to do -I suppose some of us never really completely surrender.

Autumn is coming — and more than any other season it is a time for reflection and remembering. I won’t let go of the child inside. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. He’s part of me and I  part of him.

I watch the children board the school bus and turn my eyes to the road ahead…and sigh.

It is such a beautiful day.

I remember long ago
Snowmen standing in the snow;
And drifting silent frozen flakes
Fell on the ground below.

I remember blazing stars
And looking up and finding Mars.
And seeing wonder in the sky
As silent castles drifted by.

I remember memories;
The soft and gentle summer breeze;
The feelings all remain inside
But I don’t remember where they hide.

I wonder where that child went
The one so happy and content?
Could it really truly be
I’ve lost the child inside of me?

Today I’ll brush myself aside
And try to find that child inside.
I’ll make the world a better place
By putting on a child’s face.