Sometimes during my daily walks, I encounter a kid who’s the same age I was when I was his age.
He’s not happy with his DayGlo orange shorts. They’re the most comfortable pair he owns, he told me, but they’re easy for people to see.
When he climbs a cedar tree in his front yard and reaches the top, he wants to be more camouflaged than the shorts allow.
I don’t fully believe he actually wants to be incognito because, if I forget to check the tree when I walk by, he calls out, “Hey,” so I can witness his remarkable achievement.
It’s not hypocritical. He’s simply a complicated kid with competing thoughts. Sometimes, he wants stealth, and other times, he requires all due attention. It’s perfectly understandable, especially for a man like me, who used to be a boy his age.
He put me in a weird and conflicted position the other day. When he called out to me, he was relatively low in the tree. (He didn’t need to call out because I’d spotted the bright orange pants from several houses away.)
My dog and I stopped in front of him and he proceeded to climb that tree as I watched. Now, I’d climbed trees as a kid his age and knew it was well within his skill set. Little kids are supposed to climb trees.
Still, the thought arose that he could loose his footing and fall. His grip on the next branch could slip. One of the limbs could snap just when he needed it most.
If any of that happened, I’d be the one standing there watching as he bounced and banged from one limb to another all the way to the grassy ground. I would witness defeat rather than triumph.
I thought those things because of the parent in me.
The parent in me is also the reason I admired his pursuit of the treetop.
I’d heard about a case where a mother was arrested for child endangerment for letting her kids walk a block or two to a neighborhood park without supervision. A concerned person saw them walking alone and called 911, and the police acted on that call.
When I was this kid’s age, that kind of thing was unheard of. We were supposed to get out of the house and not come back until the street lights came on. We weren’t so much kicked out of the house as strongly encouraged to make ourselves scarce.
While we were on our own and making our own decisions, we did stupid things that could’ve gotten us killed had events gone slightly differently.
Memories of climbing an outcropping, slipping on unexpected ice and nearly falling 20 feet onto sharp rocks made later parenting decisions more difficult than they otherwise might’ve been.
Kids can slip. Limbs do break. Hands don’t always reach the sapling before the whole body goes flailing over the edge.
Still, the kid climbs his tree, and I’m proud of him for it. He might fall. He very well might, and he’ll have to live with the consequences.
But he’s not going to be a kid forever. If he’s lucky, he’ll someday reach my age, and during the journey from now to then, he’ll have to step up in uncountable ways and take responsibility for his own life and its direction.
He’s bound to fall along the way, but thanks to his early training, he’ll know to keep going up, up, up.
