A couple of weeks ago, we went fishing. Nothing very fancy: we took a couple of fishing rods, threw in some minnows and waited for the fish to bite. We were joined by a charming couple -- a man and his seven-year-old grandson. The old man belonged to the silent generation but the grandson made up for his laconic grandfather, prattling on about the small fish he kept having to throw back into the lake. We teased him saying that it was the same crabby that he kept catching over and over again. Grampa smiled broadly at his grandson and at us. The grandson was obviously enjoying the whole thing.
Sure, you say, this kid probably had one good day in a month. He lives in a city and all this is just a diversion from the grind of every-day life. Maybe, maybe not. Because, you see, when I think back, my childhood was not all that idyllic either. There was the schoolyard cruelty, being the only foreigner in an African school. There were the recurring bouts of malaria. Then, there was the harmattan wind. But these are not the things I remember. I remember the Japanese friend of my father's who took me swimming, carrying me deep into the sea on his back so that I could see the teeming underwater life. I have to jog my memory to bring back memories of being bitten by the sharp harmattan wind that blew down from the Sahara, although the geography textbook states that the harmattan lasted three months of the year.
Short of having suffered outright abuse, our human memories will rose-tint our childhoods. Most of today's kids will talk about their childhoods, twenty years hence, as having been idyllic.
