It looks like spring is finally here.
After three weekends of snow and freezing weather, I sat on the back porch Sunday evening listening to a symphony of songbirds and waterfowl in the cattail marsh behind our house. Joining in the chorus were the chirping of frogs. The sound sent my memory back to my childhood growing up in Connecticut.
There, a pond behind our house was filled in the spring by the chirping calls of a small frog called a spring peeper. I remember one evening as a young boy taking a flashlight back to the pond. I searched in the dark for whatever was making the noise, and it was thrilling to shine the light and see those little fogs clinging to blades of marsh grass. They could even stick to a pane of glass thanks to tiny suction cups on their toes. Discovering and catching those little frogs, and experiencing the little adventures that nature offers to a young and curious mind, are what started a lifelong love of the outdoors.
That memory of the frogs triggered another remembrance from long ago. Like it was yesterday, I started remembering the players for the New York Yankees of the 1950s. Not just the big stars like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, but the ones that never became household names. Shortstop Gil McDougal, third baseman Andy Carey, first baseman Bill Skowron — at one time, I knew them all.
That started a lifelong interest in sports.
That’s one of the values of sports and the outdoors. They create lasting memories and help form the kind of people we turn out to be. Although the pressures of adult living can sometimes bury those memories under a mountain of anxiety and doubts, they remain. And they come back to us when we need reminding about what matters most.
We are constantly bombarded with information these days, not all of it good to hear. Those real-life experiences in the woods or on the field as a child are what take me back to what’s real and make me feel better.
I worry that kids growing up today are denied the chance to have experiences like I did — particularly with the advent of television, which was still relatively new when I was growing up. Children seem to spend less and less time outdoors. With computers and video games now available, it seems like kids would rather sit and watch then search and discover.
The curiosity is still there, however, because when I’m around young children they still ask about the birds they see or the stars in the sky. They still imagine shapes in the clouds.
Our imaginations are one of the things that make us special as individuals, but what we imagine is now provided for us as media replaces real-life experiences and interactions with nature. We need to return to a simpler time, when watching birds in flight would be all we’d need to send our thoughts into flights of fancy.