A Kid's Reality

Tearing a stripe of grass, Billy squeezes it between his thumbs. Each fingernail is a dark half-circle of dirt. Tangled across his legs are a rash of mud splatters and fresh, red scratches from the tree he just scaled. When he blows on the grass, it honks piercingly, like the squawk of a goose.

He's sailing leaves in his pond, imagining that each is a boat, "and then I throw rocks at it until it sinks." Tall grass nearby offers hiding spots for water gun fights. "We ambush each other," he says, "and jump at each other with sticks."

But his favorite part of this deep green fantasy space, with its rope swing for flying and steep hill for racing and its tunnels of vines and the bridges over the creek and a platform for stage performances with his cousins, is his forest, a wooded fringe along the side where "there's cool sticks, and you can make little passages."

In the forest, there are bluebirds and cardinals, and honeysuckle in the spring, and "once I saw a garden snake," Billy continues. Deeper into the forest, across the moat with a drawbridge, is his fort, where he and his friends have water balloon fights. They sneak candy from the house and eat it, and in the corner he stores his bow and arrows and the sword and shield he made for pirate fights.

"I used to be obsessed with pirates," he says.

But that's no longer so true. Ask why, and he thinks for a moment, then looks almost confused, like maybe he sort of knows, but hasn't yet absorbed the idea that it's possible to "outgrow" anything other than a pair of shoes.

"I don't know," he says. He sounds, momentarily, wistful.

In the adult world, parental worries abound: Kids are overscheduled and missing out. Recess is canceled to give more time to instruction. Kindergarteners must now know how to read. Playtime is dead. So, it seems, is childhood.

It seems almost like our culture of achievement in overdrive has demonized "free" time, as though it's a relic best left behind, as though kids' random meanderings and fanciful whims are wayward sheep in need of a border collie. As though childhood itself will preclude all future success.

And then you meet Sophie Falvey, 7, and her friend Sarah Hütter, 8. They're upstairs in Sophie's Takoma Park home, in the playroom, where the floor is a sprawling mess of . . . Sophie takes a quick survey, then lists aloud: "teacups, fake bread, toy houses, stuffed horses, Legos, a naked Barbie -- everything!" In the corner is the closet where the girls disappear into "a gypsy game."

Sarah: "We pretend to be gypsies and -- "

Sophie: " -- you wear your mom's old clothes -- "

Sarah: " -- and we pretend to cast spells on the evil non-gypsy people who dare to trespass." Pause. "Non-gypsy people are called 'gorgios.' And there's Rumbaro, king of the gypsies."

Sophie: "No one plays him. We like to have a lot of invisible characters."

Today is not a gypsy day. Today the girls are typing away at "The Unseen Will," a seven-scene -- so far -- play they've been writing, just for fun, for the past three months. It takes place in an orphanage, in 1820, and it involves painted cardboard sets, 19th-century costumes and a plot that includes stolen jewels, a missing will and Anna Corset, the mean woman who adopts Sophie's character, Mary Miggle, as a way to slither out of attending any more night meetings. The script has Miss Anna getting "into a verbal fight (except whip)" and stomping her foot and saying such things as: "I won't stand for it! I don't care what the butcher" -- played by Sarah, with pillows around her middle and arms because butchers "have fat arms" -- "said!"

At one point, the girls have decided, Miss Anna's appearance onstage will be accompanied by the Beatles' "All the Lonely People."

Sophie: "So the audience might think that's why she's so mean, because she's lonely. But really, she's so lonely because she's so mean."

Sarah (a.k.a. the play's "Mastermind"), surprised: "How do you know that?"

Sophie, perplexed: "That's what you told me."

Sarah: "Oh."

And on it goes, childhood's unstoppable whir.

An unfamiliar car parks in the neighbor's driveway. The magnifying glasses appear, and a couple of self-appointed detectives start prowling the perimeter of the neighbor's yard, scribbling clues into a notebook: Who drives that car? Why's it here? Where has the neighbor been lately? And if there are any dead bodies or kidnap victims to discover, where would those be hiding?

Or at the pool, there's a shark! Everyone must race to escape! Feet frantic, hearts panicked . . . then faces euphoric when all the kids (but not the grown-ups -- grown-ups never understand these things, so they've all been eaten) splash out victorious and alive, proud survivors of the imagination's latest adventure.

(So sad about the grown-ups. They were survivors once, too.)