Don't Tiptoe

Cotton candy skies overlooking the farm might as well have been the sapphire horizon of the Tuscan coast. The pond, thick and overpopulated with catfish, a substitute for the rolling, Baltic Sea. I was perched in a tree on a 2x4, 8 feet off the ground at best. But in the snapshot of my memory, I’m looking out the dormer of a castle with hundreds of acres of lush green countryside slithering into the sunset.

My friends’ house on 114 Leslie Street was a theater house off Broadway. The oversized clothes we wore were costumes made of the finest silk. Our roller skates were props built on risers that would be pushed onto the stage by stage hands dressed in their show blacks, and on that stage we would perform our carefully choreographed dance to a cassette version of “Mr. Sandman”, which in my memory was played by a live orchestra nestled below us, lit only by the lights on their music stands.

My bike rides through the neighborhood were cross-country ventures with teams of bicyclists, numbers proudly pinned to their chests. The Saturday little league games that played out in the fields across from my house were more exciting than Yankees stadium on game day. And when I dared beyond the border of my elementary play yard, I was stepping into Terabithia, where others wouldn’t dare to venture because they weren’t as bold or daring as I.

Any actual snapshot of my treehouse shows me leaning against the ladder sporting my florescent outfits and neon mismatched socks. At 8 years old, my teeth were far too large for my face, and the perm that I had begged for in second grade was growing out and putting up quite a fight against the hair that was trying to replace it. Even though I felt like I spent my summers climbing high into the clouds, my treehouse was, in all actuality, short enough to be fully supported by beams and safe enough for me to play in while everyone else went about their business. My uncle built it for me in the backyard of my grandparents‘ farmhouse, and it wasn’t until the little boy that lived up the hill built his towering treehouse that mine seemed to lose its magic.

I had a good childhood. The only trauma was actually just the drama of my brother being born and stealing all of my attention. We were a middle-of-the-road family living on a minister’s salary, and my parents reminded me on a regular basis that riches were not ‘things’ that could be bought, but rather love and memories and laughter that could be bundled up together to make one rich. Because of that, (and let’s be honest, because they still bought me really nice clothes), I felt wealthy. The world, truly, was my playground. Ask me what I wanted to be, and I would have answered “The President” or “An Actress” or “A US Ambassador to Kenya”, because all of those things were legitimate possibilities.

If we’re not careful to cultivate it, the vibrant technicolor imagination of our childhood becomes a monochromatic collection of lists and schedules. We lose our ability to drown out the traffic and picture ourselves on the world’s stage, audience blacked out and silent while we speak our captivating monologue into the spotlight. We stop playing dress up. We stop going on bike rides, secretly hoping to get so lost that we can’t make it back for dinner. We don’t run outside in our pajamas and bare feet when we see snow. We don’t twirl and dance wildly trying to capture it on our tongues. Instead, we bundle up, build a proper fire, settle in, and shield ourselves from one of nature’s most dramatic spectacles.

We buckle up, and clean up messes, and stash savings into an account that will help us get by when we’re old. We stop petting dogs and start using umbrellas and drive to parks with plastic equipment when we want our children to play.

I want Jude to grow up on God’s playground: climbing trees, and slashing inferior branches with his carefully hand-crafted sword. I want to see him in a cape, talking fiercely to the foes of his imagination, telling them just how unconquerable he really is. 

I want him to spin and run and jump. I can’t tell you the last time I jumped outside of a fitness facility. And even then, it was horribly uncomfortable, and I had to take all sorts of precautions in order for it to not be disastrous. 

I’ve been coming up empty lately. I sent Caleb a text message the other day and told him something was broken. He called immediately to see if he needed to come pick me up, having interpreted it as yet another vehicle debacle. Practical. Pragmatic. It’s like a game of “Go Fish” where I say, “Do you have any twos?” And he yells, “Bingo!”

Perhaps broken wasn’t the word. Tattered, perhaps. It’s that snapshot of my memory nagging at me, the one of a girl with perched in a treetop with the birds, fearless, stuffed to the brim with confidence and wanderlust. 

She’s still in me somewhere. She’s the wildly creative side of me that I want to frantically tape together so as not to lose her. She’s an alter ego that keeps me light and funny and sharp and in tune with the glorious details of the life around me.

She knocks at my door more and more these days, asking me to come out and play. I tell her I can’t because I’m busy being a grown up, and there are too many things to put in order first. “Can’t you see I’m doing the dishes for hundredth time this week?” I yell at her, and she shrugs, unaffected, and skips away, only to return another day.

I get so frustrated at Caleb sometimes, because he has no problem sitting down with his guitar or playing drums at bedtime or stopping what he’s doing to play a video game on his phone. The other day he was making Jude laugh so hard by throwing the ball against the wall. In the mayhem, he threw it a bit too high and it ricocheted and broke a little vase of mine.  I acted really upset and disappointed and he felt horrible. But I wasn’t upset at the fact that he broke the vase; I was upset because I can’t remember the last time I broke something because I was having so much fun. 

In the Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne penned:

 “All around you people will be tiptoeing through life just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance. Just don’t tiptoe.”

I think I’ll put on my romping shoes today. It’s time to go out and play.