When I was a kid, I lived next door to an elderly lady named Mrs. Smith. She and I would sit on the front porch together. She liked to put empty coffee cans outside and listen to the sound of plopping rain as the water hit the bottom of the cans. This particular sound soothed her, and it soothed me too. I was only six years old, but listening to that soft rain fall into the bottom of those Folgers cans seemed the most exciting and glamorous thing in the world.
That’s the way it is. When you’re a kid, you have a very low threshold of excitement. Years later, when my son was about four years old, he found a rotten apple core underneath the couch, and he came and presented it to me as though it were the most interesting thing in the world, a simple and putrid thing, but to him, it was extremely glamorous. That’s the way it is. When you’re a kid, you see a kind of exotic in the world that you miss when you’re an adult.
Thomas Hood, the poet, said it best:
I remember.
I remember the fir trees dark and high.
I used to think their slender tops were close against the sky.
It was a childish fantasy,
But now it is little joy to think I’m farther off from heaven than when I was a boy.
This is Tom McBride, and that’s my perspective.
