ELIZABETH CITY, N. C. Iwant to talk about being a boy because it’s something I know a little bit about; at least that’s what I’ve heard over the years. There’s this book, The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Hal Iggulden and when it first came out I wanted to scoff. I wanted to scoff because on the back cover of the book it entreats the potential reader to “Recapture Sunday afternoons and long summer days” as if we had lost those somewhere along the line. But we had lost those, and the boys—yes, the girls too, but indulge me, please—well, they weren’t doing the same things that boys had done so many years ago. And it took having boys for me to get this idea that boys’ minds were being taken captive by virtual worlds. Outside, once upon a time, Chris Grey and I gathered scrap wood and climbed into the cradle of a tree in his backyard. There we constructed several platforms where on any afternoon we would sit, perched off the ground, imagining we were Tom and Huck, on a raft, carried downstream upon the Mississippi River, escaping pirates or Injun Joe.
In the summertime, in Little Rock, Ark., where I spent most of my summers, Matthew Lee and I would wander the streets on our bicycles, our trusty pocketknives in our pockets; a tool to help scrape away the dirt as we dug for arrowheads or searched for the occasional tarantula we might find.
There was always mischief to accomplish, and adventures to have just so long as the nights were short and the days hot.
And then there is here and now and my boys and their love of the outside and that eternal imagination or curiosity. In the morning, for example, they must run to the water tank behind the house to see if their tadpoles have turned to frogs, sitting patiently as they examine each one for legs.
And I see my boys, and I listen and I reel at the thought that I am growing older without taking that moment to jump in there and be a boy and forget that I have this assumed authority, a parent who must be taken seriously. After all, isn’t this the time of year when we build tree houses ?
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