{"id":15973,"date":"2018-12-06T15:12:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T20:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=15973"},"modified":"2018-12-06T15:12:54","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T20:12:54","slug":"the-child-inside-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/the-child-inside-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Child Inside"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Child Inside<\/span><\/h1>\n

“I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.”\u00a0– Mark Twain<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t mind those first few cold days of winter. I think the pristine whiteness of the first measurable snowfall is beautiful \u2013 and the newly white world, I find serene and breathtaking. I like the way the sound cracks in the cold, clear, crisp air and I love to look at the skeletons of the summer trees when they are dressed it their gowns of ghost-white snow.<\/span><\/p>\n

My mind\u2019s vision of snowy hills and wistful flakes drifting silently through the winter twilight is both a happy one as well as a rueful and nostalgic one. Never again will I be a small boy dragging a red sled behind me \u2013 and standing at the top of a mighty hill, looking down toward the bottom with trepidation and excitement. Never again will I be a boy with frozen fingers and toes, running home to a glowing, warm house and a cup of hot chocolate; that cup tastes even sweeter now because my mom made it for me from scratch. It was real cocoa not the instant kind from a pouch.<\/span><\/p>\n

With a profound and melancholy yearning, I look back at myself, a young boy, lacing up his new ice skates, sitting next to a warm, blazing, bonfire, raging in an old rusty drum. As deeply as this movie has been etched in a deep, untouchable corner of my mind, so have the happy sounds of laughter of the children skating by me. <\/span><\/p>\n

I can hear their skates making clear sharp sounds scraping sounds as they slide across the smooth and strangely-blue ice. These sounds are as real as any sounds can be – they were recorded somewhere in time, in hidden corner of my mind. Wherever these wonderful and vivid memories are stored in my mind, whenever I play this back this scene in my mind, the soundtrack is always synchronized perfectly with the movie the I watch in\u00a0 my mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

A shiver always runs through me as I recall those halcyon days. But a deep, dark sorrow grips me too, for those are days I can never live again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Winter is an amalgam of happy and sad, of yearning and contentment, of sweet and bitter.\u00a0 It is time for longing for what will be and a time for remember what used to be.\u00a0 U wonder how I became what I am and I wonder where I’m going from here. I wonder if the reflections of the past are somehow colored by time into something they never really were.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. So, it’s the laughter, we will remember, whenever we remember – the way were were…” (“The Way We Were\u00a0” written by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman and Marvin Hamlisch .)<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe it is the laughter and happy times I remember most. Maybe those sad, dark, and bitter memories become more and more difficult to remember after time has had a chance to massage and fade them. Maybe my mind works its magic secretly, and unknown to me, it has been busying itself filtering, eroding and erasing – making good memories seem better than the were and bad memories not as bad as they were.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe the day will come when I won\u2019t be able to recall the bitter, sad, hurtful memories at all. Maybe its the natural filter of time at work. Maybe all I am and all I will ever be is the person I am whose memories and experiences are filtered by time and nothing is really the way it seems.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I want those memories, bad or good, filtered so much. I want to remember the dark, hurting, sad days just as much as I want to remember the beautiful and happy ones. But I\u2019m not sure why \u2013 it just seems they are as much a part of me as the happy memories. I think I am the sum of all of them. I am the happy and the sad; I am the bitter and the sweet. I am the bad and the good; I am the morose and the sublime.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today though, I am just a young boy with a red sled and a pair of shiny new ice skates. Having long since said goodbye to summer, and with autumn old and struggling weakly to stave off the hard, biting winds of winter, I will look out the window today anxiously awaiting those first few flakes of snow. When I see them, the child inside me will run outside and look up at the sky and catch a snowflake on his tongue.<\/span><\/p>\n

There will always be a child inside me; it is the child inside the man. And, I love the gifts he gives me, they are too precious to ever let him go.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Child Inside “I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.”\u00a0– Mark Twain I don\u2019t mind those first few cold days of winter. I think the pristine whiteness of the first measurable snowfall is beautiful \u2013 and the newly white world, I find serene and breathtaking. I like the way the sound cracks in\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228,1741],"tags":[1720,2839],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15974,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15973\/revisions\/15974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}