My Life As A Hobby

      As I look back on the life I lived, I seem to focus a lot on my childhood.  I think most anyone does. As the time between now and then grows longer, our memories seem to grow fonder. However, I readily admit that life is mostly better nowadays, although it’s a lot more complicated.  Nevertheless, many of us still pine for the simple days of long ago; the days before social media and iPhones ruled kid’s lives. The days when Google was a set of World Book Encyclopedias.  There are lots of people, places, and things that were important to me when I was growing up (not including parents or siblings- that’s a given). All of them certainly enriched my childhood, and many of them gave me life lessons I still use to this day. Some of them got me in trouble, some of them gave me a heartache - of course, now I can see that it was all part of the growing up experience.   Let me list a few of mine for you. I hope it makes you think about some of you...

One thing that’s funny about snow in the south is how we will desperately try to find something to use to slide down an icy hill.  Besides the folks who buy 6 gallons of milk and 10 loaves of bread when they see a snowflake, lots of southerners will begin to search for anything that might give them a chance to take a icy, fast ride.  Most of the time their creations fail - but, it’s usually because there’s not enough snow on the ground. Hey, even an Olympic bobsled won’t work in a dusting of snow. However, on the rare occasion when we get a few inches of the white stuff, people will pull out you-name-it; garbage can lids, pieces of laminate, a cookie sheet, inner tubes, dog beds, even a cardboard box wrapped in a garbage bag, to  joy ride down a steep, slick incline.  Fortunately for me and my three boys,   years ago I built a nice wooden homemade sled. I even nailed a couple of flat curtain rods to the bottom, which made that sucker really fast. Most of th...