IN WHICH: Joel wants to go play with sticks again

I have a question for parents out there:  How do you recapture imagination to play with your children?

It's the weirdest thing for me - especially for me.  But I'm realizing that I've lost a lot of my imagination.  And I find that ninety kinds of weird, because I still consider myself to have a vivid imagination.  I play Dungeons and Dragons via Skype with some of my friends back in Pittsburgh at least once a month.  I read books like Game of Thrones and get lost in the mental images that they paint for me.  I'm a hopeless geek/nerd who can tell you way too much about obscure Star Wars characters or things from Doctor Who.  My friends in college used to call me a walking IMDB because I make a lot of connections between actors in movies and things.

But when my son brings me a wooden block and puts it up to my ear because he wants me to pretend it's a phone, I turn into the block of wood.  I say "Hello?"  I listen to the block-phone for a few minutes as he talks into the matching one he's holding in his hand, and I say "Is that so?" to him, but I don't imagine the conversation we're having.  I don't decide in my head what he's saying to me and respond to him.  I don't know what he's saying - just that he's telling me something.

When I was in seminary, I worked at the day-care center that helped take care of students' and faculty members' kids during school.  There were some 3 and 4 year old kids there who used to have the most stunning adventures with happy-meal toys and action figures.  Their adventures would take them all over the little Fisher Price play-sets of castles, moats, Old West towns, and Jurassic volcanoes, and they'd invite me to come along, to play the "bad guy" and get my figure thrown in jail or launched off of the battlements in dramatic plastic fashion... It was always the bad guy, because they wanted to be the "good guys" - and don't we all want to be the good guys when we're three and four?  I'd play along and follow their lead, but I was never able to immerse myself in that adventure with them, to really get back into that groove of true play.

I don't know when this happened.  I don't even know how it happened, though I can make some guesses just about the whole process of growing up, of giving over room in our minds from play to process, from imagination to analysis.  Regardless of the how, I've come to realize that I've started to lose something that I never wanted to lose in the first place.  And I'm not sure how to get it back.

This kid right here?  That was me, once upon a time.  The house I grew up in had a back yard that just ended with woods.  And those woods were the playground of my mind.  They were Narnia.  They were the forest moon of Endor.  They were an alien landscape to explore with the other members of my away team from the starship Enterprise.  They were the woods of Little Round Top as I defended it with my brothers in the 20th Maine.  Whatever my imagination made them out to be, that was what they were.  

Those woods gave me one of my favorite gifts ever, as a matter of fact.  When we had first moved to that house, I had gone out to the woods to play over around the old rotting tree-stand that the teenage boys who had lived in the house before me had built at some point.  At the roots of the tree, I found a blaster.  An actual, honest-to-God, blaster.  

Toys were so much cooler in the '80s

As a kid who loved Star Wars as much as I did (I'm telling you - I even love those live-action Ewok movies!), this was something akin to discovering the Ark of the Covenant in your back yard.  Whoever the kids were that had lived in the house before us, they must have had this toy (which I've since discovered is part of a GI Joe laser tag game from 1987!) and played with it out in the woods, as well.

It wasn't electronic anymore - the cover on the battery compartment (that black piece on the handle) was long gone - the duct tape that had held the compartment onto the gun in the first place nothing more than residue.  The wires that connected to the 9V battery nothing more than frayed twists of copper and insulation, which I yanked out the rest of the way after I cleaned off  the caked mud and grime of the woods that had covered my new treasure.  But this... this was my new favorite toy in the world.  In fact, the woodsy patina that it had gained, the rusted screws holding it together, and the duct-tape residue actually made it feel more real to me, more stimulating to my childish imagination.  This was what the blasters in Star Wars looked like, anyway!  The guns that the alien raider creatures carried and fired in the Ewok movies were piecemeal, held together with tape.  They looked rugged, well worn, like a rebel or a raider's weapon should look.  Who needed the battery compartment?  Who needed it to make noises when your mouth could make all the blaster noises you needed - and make them better than most of the electric "laser gun" toys out there did, anyway?

And so my adventures in the woods were formed.  I would put a pair of old soccer shin-guards that I found at Salvation Army or somewhere over my forearms to look like Boba Fett's arm-guards.  I'd push "buttons" on them and make little beep-boop-beep noises like I was programming something - the self destruct on a Predator's arm-computer, the radar blips of the Colonial Marines on their bug hunt on LV-426, or Ziggy's constant coughing, weezing computing as Al tried to help Sam to his next leap.  I'd run around, shin guards on my arms, a makeshift cape of some kind tied around my neck, my blaster in hand, and my grandfather's old motorcycle helmet squarely on my head, pretending to be someone, anyone from Star Wars.  My friends would come over and they'd do the same thing.  We'd play the old Ghostbusters 2 game on my Nintendo, then grab our proton packs and go trap ghosts in the back yard.  We'd put on civil war hats and grab the cap guns and rifles I'd gotten over time from tourist shops in Gettysburg and go charging through the woods, fighting off imaginary "Johnny Rebs" hiding behind every tree-line.  We'd take our blasters and explore the alien world, or continue our escape from the pursuit of our evil captors who had imprisoned us on this hideous planet.  We'd be the intrepid party of explorers searching the jungle for a cure to some tropical disease that could be found only in the rare indigenous skunk cabbage that grew in lush patches throughout the swampy area that the woods inevitably became after you'd gone out into them for a bit.  And then, once we'd accomplished our task in the woods, we'd come racing out of them, sometimes covered to our knees in mud from the swamp, then jump into the cockpits of our "X-Wings" and pedal them up and down the street till our parents called us in to dinner.

That was my world - and we'd carry it onto the playground, pretending that the jungle gym was our space-ship, that our fantasy world was out there in the yard at recess.  That everywhere we went could suddenly become a different world just by saying that it was.  My basement became the Emperor's throne room as I hid with my green lightsaber in the space under the stairs, behind the furnace and the hot water heater, waiting for my friend to finish his Darth Vader line as he holds his red lightsaber, and as soon as he says "So... you have a sister..." I yell "NOOOO" and flash - my lightsaber is on and we're going at it just like in Return of the Jedi.

Heck, I'm just glad YouTube didn't exist when I was in 8th grade - otherwise I would seriously have been the "Star Wars Kid" viral video.

But now my son is looking at me, holding up the block-phone and I'm at a loss - there's a piece of wood at my ear and there's no voice coming out of it with which I can really interact.  I've forgotten how to fly.  And I don't know how to play with my son anymore.

I tell myself, it'll be easier when he gets older.  I'll be able to pretend with him, to take him out into the woods and play the games I used to play, to make the world magical again.  But if I can't take a simple block of wood and use it to pretend... how am I going to transform an entire world around me?

It's something I know I'm working on, and I know I'm not alone in this.  We all go through this as we get older and learn to think differently... but I never thought about how much I've really lost in that process, how that spark of imagination could really make a difference in the way we approach things.  And yet I know it's not entirely gone - it shows up in my writing, in my sermons, in some of my approach, but it's tempered, matured... not as wildly imaginative.

It's time to work on remembering how to fly.