SCHOOL'S OUT, BUT NOT FOR YOU

Here's a question you and I may have forgotten how to ask: What do kids do during summer vacation...?

I'm not talking about the throngs of libidinous college students who trek the planet. Or the ragamuffin high schoolers who often enjoy nothing better than doing nothing. My question has to do with the kids in elementary school who are the true connoisseurs of time: who relish it, manipulate it, fantasize with it, and in general have a talent for squeezing 25 hours out of every vacation day.

Can you remember how delicious it was to be that young? That free? Probably not. It takes a heap of remembering to conjure up those tasty days of summer innocence. For as the song goes, "Once you've crossed the borders of childhood, you can never return again..."

But you can look!

Like some exquisite painting beneath museum glass, you can look at the children and the grandchildren at play, just maybe maybe recapturing a little shred of the magic. Not their video-game magic; the magic that leaps from their deepest soul as they giggle at the fresh sunrise..rush their way through dressing and breakfast...pounce on the morning outside...study the dirt as they squat in it....explore the heaven from their back...scamper up trees, concoct games, announce races, rush in for drinks. Then repeat the giddy routine all over again.

Whether sugar and spice or naughty and nice, little girls and little boys are God's greatest works of art. As attentive adults we get to put a frame around the painting, but its glow comes from a higher place.

Probably the best thing we can do is treasure it, for it is with us only such a little while. Oh -- and about all that mud they keep bringing into the house. Someday you'll look at your clean, shiny floors and miss it...!