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What scares me about this “vanishing children” phenomenon is what it’s doing to kids’ imaginations. We had a treehouse when we were kids (nowadays you’d have to get an EPA Impact Analysis done and the Sierra Club would burn your house down if you drove a nail into a tree), and that treehouse was Fort Apache, a bombed-out store in Bastogne, a pioneering settlement on Alpha Centauri (and the spaceship that got us intrepid explorers there), the fast attack submarine Sea Lion or a swift three-masted corsair. We defended it with picket-fence swords, tree-branch cannons, and laser ray-guns shaped oddly like mom’s broom handles and with sound effects that left us so hoarse we could hardly ask for the mashed potatoes that night at mess call. Our imaginations soared and sometimes our games would last for days.

With all that mindpower replaced by 3-D flashing images and Dolby Surround-Sound and Mattel Scratch-n-Sniff, a machine does all the mental heavy lifting for you. And it directs you where IT wants you to go, not where the random flight of your imagination would take you.

Maybe I’m just a geezer but I’ll take my treehouse.

And if you put baseball cards in the spokes of your
bike, you had a motorcycle,and you and the guys would ride
around “terrorizing” the neighborhood.

Funny thing is....when I got older and got a real motorcycle,
it wasn’t quite the same....

My granddad made me a treehouse that looked like a for-real P51 Mustang. It had a working joystick, pedals and a back seat for my chums. Pap angled it slightly upwards and cut away the branches in such a way that with very little effort it seemed like you were climbing high into the sky to duke it out with the Luftwaffe. It was satisfyingly high up so that if anyone had fallen out they'd have broken a leg, at least. Nobody ever did, of course. It was great fun for years until a thunderstorm broke it up.

I wonder if anyone would even think that was fun today.