Easing Back In

I am reminded of the tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear if it's making a sound as I announce my return. Yes, I took an unannounced, not entirely voluntary Thanksgiving hiatus. I don't have a fully functional laptop anymore, let alone one with internet access, and there was no private computer I could use effortlessly on my own time while I was away. So I just ate instead. Seriously, I ate a lot.

But now I am back, and as the end of the year approaches, or will arrive on schedule after the inevitable blind chaos of the next few weeks during which I celebrate two major holidays, Lily's and my birthday, and a whole host of holiday gatherings, school events, work commitments, bookkeeping and other joyful and not so joyful December undertakings, my thoughts turn to the New Year and my annual resolutions regarding writing. They haven't turned there yet, but they will, and I'm just warning you. There may be some soul searching, some promises bound to be broken or stretched out of shape. There may be some grand sweeping statements, some haunting insecurities, a mixture of bravado and fear. But that is still to come. For tonight, as I ease back in, I give you: Flat Coins.

All the fuss these days about "helicopter parenting" and the "overscheduled child" always reminds me of my own childhood, during which I spent hours a day--more--outdoors, exploring the yards and fields of the people and places that created me, allowed me to create myself. On our (eight hour!) drive back from our Thanksgiving trip, I was looking out the window at one point, just letting my mind wander, when all of a sudden I remembered the field behind the First Parish Church, where the train tracks ran. The train didn't stop in Sudbury, but it ran through it, or had once, and on Sunday mornings when the adults had coffee and talked in the big room, we were set free on the lawn outside, free to lie under the chestnut tree, run like banshees through the centuries-old cemetery behind the church, head back through a grove of trees to a vast expanse of land through which the train tracks ran.

We couldn't have been very old: 9 or 10 at the most, I would imagine. We were fearless and filled with a sense of adventure. We were trusted but not overly considered--so much of my childhood was mine, and my sister's and my cousins' and my friends' in a way that seems so very much in the past to me now. We were often a little band, enough to play hide and seek or kick the can tag or Red Rover or have chicken fights between the tombstones. Back by the old train track, though, we put pennies on the track, lined them up in a jaunty copper row, in the hope that a train--were they still running?--would flatten them into paper-thin wafers, the way we knew trains did, could, had.

Funny, I really can't remember if the trains were running then. I think they weren't, can vaguely conjure up a sense of crumbling and decay about the tracks. But a little sense of danger, too, borne of cartoons where someone was always being strapped to a track, or rescued at the very last second, a sense that skipping down a rail in the hot sun of a late May noontime, was just illicit enough, even if the trains had been retired.

I've seen lots of those machines in museums where you can feed in a penny and get the flat wafer back for a rip-off fifty cents. This, I feel, is not the same. Not the same at all.