Reverend Benny & Mister Sid's At Your Service #53

The autumn has a beauty of its own, but for me the dream of summer persists through the other seasons.

By Glen Bledsoe

(Salem) - Life is good in the summer. The sense of summer freedom is intoxicating to me. Every color that the sun picks out in the flowers, every bird-song sung, every shimmy of trees in the wind reminds me that this is the best of all seasons. Summers should last forever.

We should be kids forever walking around, skipping rocks across ponds, reading books that we want to read--not books that someone else has picked for us and are so boring that it dulls the imagination.

The greatest gift western civilization gives itself is to grant children the right to remain children until they are physically adults. I spent a little time in Morocco some years ago, and their children were mini-adults.

Cocky little boys strutted the streets demanding money with outstretched palms or slipping it out of your pocket if you weren't paying attention.

Ten year old girls worked in carpet factories and the adults boasted about the fact. The son took up the father's occupation generation after generation.

No chance for them to discover what they were about.

A culture that operates like this appears stunted to me, although I'm sure they find their joys their way.

I worry that with the pressure for high test scores we will steal our children's childhoods away. What a poor trade-off that would be.

The enemy of summer, of course, is time and the tilt of the planet. It will be fall all too soon. The autumn has a beauty of its own, but for me the dream of summer persists through the other seasons.

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