Olly Olly Oxen Free!

Another run through scenic, suburban Potomac at 5:15 in the morning. Sometimes I run with headphones, mostly without. This morning I chose a new route, and with the aid of Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt I felt the wide rolling streets belonged to me alone. Every house lay still and shuttered, not even a newspaper boy to be seen. I felt that if I had more time, more than 45 minutes, I could've run on and on, into the next neighborhood, the next Hopper painting, through another of Bert's chalk drawings...no trouble breathing, no tightness of muscle or knee. Some ache in the bad shoulder, having been accidentally decked by a tossed chair last Friday.

Still trying to reconcile the physical illiteracy of these wonderful, open, creative kids I have in my charge. So much lost, it seems, in the thirty years since I was a child. What do they call it now? Nature deficit disorder? Children not offered the freedom, the mandate to spend all day everyday outside--running, skipping, sliding, hiding, riding, falling, racing. Gosh, when I wasn't in school I was outside, especially in the summer. Outside until the sun had dipped far below the horizon and the exasperated calls of parents to children scattered throughout the neighborhood wrenched us from our exhilarating freedom. Climbing over, under, on; racing to, from, with, against; riding up, down, around; falling far, falling hard, landing dangerously--all of these were expected things, part of the language we shared with our peers, part of our universe. We came home dirty and scuffed, bruised, with caked-on blood from barely noticed scratches. Our ankles were dirty, our necks were dirty, our fingernails kept short and torn. Each night there was a bath, a transition from the Law of Nature to the Land of Hushaby...

No strength in these kids legs or arms, no awareness of it's lack. But we are "Great Theatre in the Great Outdoors," and our search for polar bears, spiders, snakes, and frogs continues in our own bodies. The dandelions and the children are blossoming up. They want to know what they don't know, they want to find the athlete-actor where one hadn't existed a minute ago. They have a thing or two to teach me about this, I am certain...