Eh?

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Originally uploaded by Rob Hoey

It snowed yesterday and my childhood flashed in front of my eyes. I remembered how I played in the snow in the mornings and my toes would get so cold that they'd itch. I'd come into the house and Dad would put Noxema on them and the itch would go away. Magic. And then I'd go out and play again, only to repeat the cycle.

It's November and it already snowed twice; maybe we'll get a white Christmas--if we do, it'll be my first one in many years. I think it has been so long since I've actually had a white Christmas that Bing Crosby's song about it just came out. Well, okay, I'm exaggerating, but it must be at least 20 plus years.

My favorite Christmas as a kid was getting my first set of electric trains. Lionel, of course, with the smoke pills and the whistle and the little houses and the tracks that fit together. Once I got too old for them, I put the trains in a box and forgot about them. Then, one day I came across them while going through my stuff. I had no use for them anymore, or so I thought, so I gave them away to my nephew, Michael. I wonder if he still has them; I doubt it.

Trains had a way of being a catalyst for the imagination; today the imagination of the young is fed by computer games, cell phone games, X-Box, and things I'm not even aware of, but I know it's out there. The trouble is, we tend to spend all of our time, lately, on our computers (as I'm doing as I write this), on our phones, in our games, and less time in our real world. George Carlin had a theory about this--he believed that this was the way for those in real power to distract us from what's most important in the world, which is how our leaders (most of whom are not visible to the public), are screwing us.
I don't know if he was correct, but I do know we need to spend more time in the here and now.
What's your favorite childhood memory, eh?