Forrest Snyder: "boyhood"

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about play. How I play, or rather, how I don't play so much anymore. Luckily, I have some great adult friends who know how to play well. They are masters. Also, I've been watching friends and their young kids play. So, I've been thinking about play which led me to think about playing in my boyhood.

One of my strongest play memories is folding paper airplanes with my dad. After supper (supper, you know, Ragu sauce with ground beef, Mueller's spaghetti, and an iceberg lettuce, carrot, and celery salad) was always play time - either games or some project - with dad. We folded a lot of airplanes. The folding was just the start. Then there was the endless trimming, launching, observing how she flew, then retrimming, launching (more into the breeze this time), watching, and over and over.

Folding paper airplanes got me thinking about the stash of wooden airplane models at my Nana and Pop-pop's house. They were in the front hall closet in a box. I'd play with them whenever I visited. "Contact! Cleared for take-off. Roger. Zoom!" Many of the World War II fighters and bombers were there, including a Japanese Zero. The neat thing was that when he was a boy, my dad built them out of old Velveeta cheese boxes. One of the features that stands out was the U.S. star that was painted on some of them. I think I remember a B-25 Bomber in particular. For some reason, the image of the star stuck. In Boyhood, the star becomes super-sized like it always was in my mind. And it becomes a propeller. And then it turns into the dirt clods I used to throw up into the air and pretend were bombs coming down.

Another part of visiting Nana and Pop-pop's was working. My grandparents were hard working people. Among other things, my grandfather took me along to the town cemetery to do the mowing. I hated it. Whenever we went, it was always the longest, hottest, day of the year. There was never any shade. The sun was directly overhead. The still air smelled of gasoline, cut grass, and my Pop-pop's sweat. The rows of stones stretched out forever. After a time, the rev of the lawnmower engine transformed into the whine of a fighter engine! Up and down the rows I flew, chasing the enemy, being chased, being shot down, sneaking through enemy cemetaries.

Other boyhood memories started flooding in. Playing in the tall grass and nearby woods. Me and a bunch of boys would get rubberband guns (or whatever weapon was in fashion) and walkie-talkies and divide up into teams to commence battle. We stalked each other through the reeds, triumphing in our abilities to surprise and shoot. And die. Boys die, a lot, I think.

Finally, barns are natural attractions to boys of 8 or 10. I had a great uncle Ralph with a barn, a friend Nathan with a barn, and a cousin Bill with a barn, too. Barns mean hay bales which mean hay forts. A hay fort was best on a cool rainy day when I couldn't fly airplanes or had to mow the cemetery. Given the better part of a day, hundreds of bales could be rearranged. After that, me and my companions would explore, crawling through dark, dusty passages, smelling the strange smells, listening for each other in the hay. We built trapped doors and secret one person hideouts as well our main forts. Under the rain, inside the barn, the sounds were of a different world, my boyhood.