Running Up That Hill

I was an odd kid. I loved listening to Barbra Streisand from the age of 4 and onward --- later I would be perplexed when record store clerks would find it odd that I would purchase a Streisand album along with a couple of Led Zepplin or Patti Smith Group records, but that was me. As a 9 year old, I used to imagine that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton were my real parents and lived in hope that they would drop by and pick me up someday. There was no such thing as "quiet" for me. To me, "quiet" was noisy. I would hear ringing sounds --- so I always was in need of some type of sound so that the sounds in my head didn't hurt too much. I still suffer from this problem as an adult, but it no longer scares me the way it did as a child. At times, I was convinced that I was living a dream and would wake up any moment in a different life. I believed this till I was about 12 and my parents divorced.

There was also a hill in our back yard --- way out, about an acre from our house. When I was about 8 I found a large stick. I loved that stick like a friend and would spend hours running up and down that hill with my trusty stick. Sometimes I would sing, sometimes I would act out scenes from movies, sometimes I would cry, sometimes I would make up stories and sometimes I just ran up and down the hill with little or no thought in my head. My Grandmother and our neighbor used to sit and watch me on that hill. Years later they told me that they would watch me for hours and just wonder what was running through my mind as I trampled up and down the hill.

I would stay on the hill with my stick for hours --- usually until someone told me it was time to come in.

Anyway, I was thinking that I missed my hill today. I don't know why I ran that hill, but it made me happy. Wouldn't it be nice to re-capture the actual happy feelings we experienced as children vs. only remembering the sad or difficult feelings? Wouldn't it be nice to have a stick and run up a hill?