MAKES A CLOUDY DAY SUNNY

As I sit here playing around on my laptop, my cell phone is buzzing and my i-pad is beeping and yet, I'm still able to concentrate on the readin' or writin' or 'rithmatic that I'm having computer do for me. It's 2015 and that's the way things are. Oops......sorry....I had to check my phone – I have 5 e-mails and a bunch of FB posts.......I'll get to them later. Right now, I'm busy multi-tasking. A post, somewhere along the relatively beaten cyber path I take from day to day, made me think of when I was young. The fleeting paragraph suddenly brought a flood of memories from when I was about the age of my grandkids. I didn't have a laptop then. Nor did I have a cell phone or an i-pad. There was no Facebook, no “face-time,” no Twitter, no Angry Birds (is that even still a game?), no Instagram, no online banking from your phone, no possible way to stay in bed all day and still be able to live a relatively full life. Back then, we had one thing to play with. It was called “outside.” It came with a lot of accessories – sunlight, fresh air, baseball diamonds, ditches and woods to ride our bikes around and through........our bikes. Our Bikes were our tickets to freedom in a world where your level of communication depended solely on the technology of how loud you could yell. It was a different world and there were trade-offs. We may not have all of the bells, whistles, gizmos and doo-dads but we had a sense of safety as we rode all around town until the street lights came on. If you were late, you might have to walk the next day because you wouldn't be able to sit on your bike seat after the “whupin'.” Yes, our parents would hit us. A slap across the mouth or, for that matter, a slap across a mouth that's full of soap because of improper language. Even “hell,” “damn” and “ass” were considered “curse” words and would qualify us for an Ivory Soap appetizer before supper. It wasn't just our parents. Our neighbors and teachers were encouraged to “keep us in line” as well. I had a 5th grade teacher named Mrs. Little. One afternoon, when I had just finished working Mrs. Little's last nerve, she whacked me across the back of the neck with and over sized post card and told me to go home and tell my parents what I had done to deserve the punishment she had meted out. I am going to guess that, had I actually told them, they would have agreed that the “zets” she gave me was, indeed, warranted. “Serves ya' right. She shoulda given ya' a rap in da mout,” my dad would have responded, in his unmistakable Brooklyn accent before going back to the daily paper. Mrs. Little's first mistake was to trust a 10 year old me. Yes, we got the occasional “rap in da' mout” because we deserved it, we learned from it and we were none the worse for wear. Our most valuable commodity, however, disappeared somewhere along the way and it seems that, the more we grow technologically, the harder it will be to get it back. Somewhere in our quest to invent machines to do our bidding , we lost our imagination.........as individuals and as a society. Our imaginations wiped out our ability to imagine. Everything is smack, dab in our faces - all we have to do is push a button or swipe a finger. I remember the day I asked my dad for a truck. I was, I'm assuming from this particular memory, a young boy who still played with trucks. He looked around, found a nice stick, handed it to me and said, in his undeniably Brooklynese “brogue,” “Here.....here's ya' truck. Now, go tell ya' mutha' she wants ya'.” It was the best truck I ever had because it could be whatever truck I imagined it to be.' Imagination is a very powerful tool and can be extremely gratifying. Imagination is the ability to see things that are not real : the ability to form a picture in your mind of something that you have not seen or experienced. When I was about 13, for instance, I actually had a very intimate affair with Annette Funicello. Of course, she wasn't privy and I'm certain I wasn't the only young teen that was fooling around with her in that way. Makes her almost seem kinda slutty in retrospect, doesn't it? We are where we are because of the imaginations of countless people who are old enough to have been around when we still had them, who took the ideas, ran with them and created the technologies we continue to watch mushroom to this day.......long after they eliminated the competition from people who use their......say it with me now...........imagination. What's the solution? We used to get on our bikes when the sun came up, play all day long and be home by the time the streetlights came on or when we heard, in my case, a whistle. Kids can't really play outside anymore. It's too dangerous. I wouldn't let my kids ride their bikes to their friends' house, across the street, without chaperoning them to the edge of the neighbor's driveway. ALL my kids...........and the oldest is 40. People gave gotten so lazy and so unimaginative that they don't even look at each other to talk.....they're too busy texting each other. I have a sinking feeling, in the pit of my stomach, that our species is going to evolve into people with no hands........just mitten-like appendages with thumbs.........and our eyes will automatically point downward. And, in our heads will be.........no ideas. I feel sad at the loss of my old pal, imagination, even though, I have been able to retain a few remnants that allow me to do things like: write this blog or see a truck in a stick. Now, if you'll excuse me.....my phone is still buzzing and my i-pad is still beeping. Although I doubt it, there may be something important or, even creative going on that I need to know about – Hmm, Imagine!