Oh, the lazy happy days of childhood...

I was talking to a friend yesterday about the travails of life -- insurance, relationships, work, kids and family, money, etc. We talked about how nice it would be to go back in time to be a kid again. Arbitrarily, I decided that 11 years old would be a nearly perfect time to go back. Two days as an eleven year old boy in late June of 1977; the year that I was eleven. That's the other part of the requirement, to go back in time as well. To be able to identify with being an eleven year old better. For my friend Vicki, it would have been 1984. Neither of us would have a clue how to live today if we suddenly became eleven, so it would be best to be in our own times.

So, there we were: Vicki as an 11 year old girl in 1984 and Bob as an 11 year old boy in 1977. Late June. School's out and there's nothing to do but enjoy life as it was meant to be enjoyed. No worries about money or families or the state of the world. At eleven years old you get upset that the news is on, since that means the cartoons aren't. You live for The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights and you bug your parents to go see Star Wars over and over. Life, in hindsight, was truly good, at least for me. I know that there are a lot of eleven year old kids -- both in 2004 and 1977 -- for whom life is, and was, not truly good. They live in poverty and pain and I feel sadness and pity for them. But this is my life and my 11 year old self doesn't really know about them in any great depth.

From there, I continued to refine this desire to retreat. I asked Vicki which she would prefer to do: Go back in time to her 11 year old self to live those two days with no knowledge of her 30 year old life but with full recall of the days' events. In this way the experience would be pure and genuine. She would be able to truly be a kid again and when she returned from her experience, those memories would be fresh in her mind and she would be able to keep them and treasure them for what they were. Or, I asked, would she like to go back and be a 30 year old in the body of an 11 year old? Where she would be able to look at her situation critically and do the things she really wanted to do? If she wanted to play with little Susie Smith down the street, who was her bestest friend from kindergarten but who moved to California when they were 12 and she hasn't heard from her since then, she can do that. There's no need to "take chances". She can appreciate the events of the days first hand and mold her experience as she wanted to. In order to simplify things I added the caveat that she wouldn't be able to change anything in her future, like telling her parents to "buy Microsoft". She would live the days as she pleased and when she came back she would have those memories intact.

Vicki chose the first option. She chose to look at the world through the genuine eyes of an 11 year old and take those experiences back with her. That's totally valid and a good choice. For me, it wasn't really that easy of a choice. There certainly is the desire to have the pure and unadulterated memory fresh in my mind of eleven year old Bobby but there was an overwhelming desire to be able to go back and spend nearly every second of that time being my parents' son and my brother's brother again. To bask in that feeling of warmth and happiness and security. I suppose that it was a double edged sword, this idle exercise of "what if?". Because it made me realize that I miss my family quite a lot, even now. My brother Jim has been gone for 17 years now. For dad it's been eight years and mom, six. That's a long time to go and the memories, though still plentiful, begin to fade slowly, like a daguerreotype from the ninteenth century. The contrasts have begun to even out and the shadows are lighter. Would it be valuable to go back and be able to really burn those images in my mind?

Or am I unable to separate the 38 year old me far enough away that I could perform this exercise for what it is? The conversation started out as a desire to escape from the issues of adulthood, yet I focus on them in my very desire to choose the most effective method of escaping it for a time. It was an odd and almost funny realization when it happened. But also sad in a way, that I have grown so far from the child that I once was and have always tried to stay close to on some level. So, because I want to never retreat too far from eleven year old Bobby, I too will choose to leave the 38 year old me here in the present and go out and play for a couple of days.