Little Boys Playing

Today as I drove by my former residence, I noticed C and E playing roller hockey in the garage. I was reminded in that instant my own boys playing hockey there. During the Stanley Cup playoffs they would play every day doing their very best impressions of Steve Yzerman. I loved watching them but more importantly listening to them. Their play was full of heroic and dynamic effort. During the NBA playoffs, they would dribble their basketballs and do their best fake crossovers. That garage saw a lot of action and it looks like it continues today. Driving along, I remembered the wall in the basement where the resident before us had marked his children's annual growth on the wall. When it came time to paint to sell the house, I couldn't cover it and left it like some ancient herogliphic. I remembered my own family's growth marked on the inside door of the bathroom upstairs. I remembered the huge hole my boys dug in the backyard one summer. They had watched The Great Escape and a tunnel was an intriguing endeavor. Where they were going and exactly why I no longer remember but I still recall their satisfied smiles when the hole exceeded their height. Like their hockey and basketball play, their imaginations ran wild with that hole. I remembered too the day N tied himself up onto a chair like his hero Indiana Jones and tried to inch his way along the top landing of the stairs. When he miscalculated a step, he fell down the stairs tumbling over and over in that chair. As he lay all discombobulated at the bottom of the stairs, he told his dad that he hurt everywhere when B asked him where it hurt.
My boys are young men now. They no longer play roller hockey and they no longer anxiously bring the ruler to mark their growth. This new house has little evidence of their being here. It's all X-box and Rock Band now. I don't hear or see that heroic imagination anymore.
Memory can be such a blessing. Just driving by a house brought back so many ideas and feelings and for a brief time, I relived so much of it. That was a wonderful house where little boys could play and explore their ambitions.