A Stepheny Reflection – Remembering Our Youth Growing Up In America

The plums are back in the produce section of Rocky Mount’s groceries. I stood before a mound of then at Harris Teeter, picking the right ones to bring home. Flickering on my internal memory screen was the movie of running away from home, age 10.

I picked some plums from the bowl on the kitchen counter, put them in a paper bag and slipped out the back screen door in Fremont, Michigan where we had a cottage. I was running away from home. I have no idea why, but like the scene in the movie, Field of Dreams, when the baseball players disappear into the corn field, I too stepped among the standing corn, taller than I was. It was hot July, and I remember the sound of flies. I began to eat a plum from my paper bag while I walked deeper into the field. I’m not sure how long it took me to eat all the plums in the bag, but when I finished the last one, my running away came to an end. I turned back and headed to the cottage. The screen door opened and closed behind me. My parents didn’t realize I’d been gone.

The Norman Rockwell paintings of our youth are icons of those days. These images portray the American innocence of childhood we hold sacred. It is why teachers, and others daring to impose the WOK ideology on our children will be struck from even the hottest place in the cornfield.

All grown up, standing over the kitchen sink with plum juice running down my chin, I know we all want to run away from time to time. When I have a moment like that, in my imagination, I can return to that corn field. I don’t know your Americana stories but as Americans, our stories can not be trivialized, it has helped make us who we’ve become as people and as a country. Here in the Rocky Mount, NC area, let’s stand on the watchtower to prevent obliterating the innocence we’ve been privileged to know.

JUNE- Field of Dreams visit. https://youtu.be/0K6ZDi-Gt9Y