Virginia Florey

The Pocket Mirror: Childhood -- the Distant Land Virginia Florey

For those of us now grown up, our childhood seems to be a distant land... We lived in a less complicated society and we all seemed to share such a commonality. We knew a childhood that lasted from the time we were able to walk to when we graduated from the eighth grade. We believed that doctors brought new babies to our house in a little black bag that they always carried. We believed adults when they said if we swallowed chewing gum that a rubber tree would grow in our stomach. We believed in ghosts, in being truthful, in respecting the adults in our life and that we were going to be rich and famous when we grew up. Our innocence was complete. And the strangest part of this is that our parents and our grandparents enjoyed that same sense of innocence. To the countless people who saw their lives echoed in mine as I wrote about the ordinary things that happen every day in our ordinary lives. To the one said to me: ?My mother left the porch light on for me, too.? Or the one who said, ?We always had an Indian blanket in our car, too.? In some strange way reading about the things that happened in my life while growing up seemed to confirm and validate what had happened in their lives while growing up. Let my pocket mirror take you back to that Distant Land.