The Early Years

By all accounts, I had a storybook childhood.  I had what a lot of kids had: two loving parents, a couple of siblings, my own room, and a decent sized group of friends with similar interests.  We loved playing pickup baseball whenever we had the chance, and being that I was rarely the last kid chosen made it all the more enjoyable.  I was also an active member the Boy Scouts.  After my first merit badge I quickly found out that contrary to popular belief, there is more to it than tying knots and wearing a goofy uniform. 

I was able to spend most weekends outside with my Dad doing exhaustively manly things.  Soon I would be an ace with a .22 caliber rifle, could hit a soda can set 30 feet away with a slingshot and , in the spirit of full disclosure, became somewhat of a wizard with the bowline.  That’s a type of knot for all of your non-scouters. 

While difficult to realize at the time, joining the Scouts was possibly the best decision that I ever made.  Granted it wasn’t so much of a choice as it was an an expectation since my Dad was the Council Executive and all around hotshot on the scouting circuit.  Some families have a history of soldiers or doctors, we had Eagle Scouts.

The time spent in the great outdoors defined much of my early years.  My Dad’s job granted him the distinct pleasure of having full access to a number of summer camps and activity centers, fully equipped for countless hours of fun.  It was in this way that I think of myself as lucky, or maybe just luckier than most kids my age.  If it wasn’t for our family’s ability to quite literally combine work and play, my exposure to all things nature may well have been severely limited.  Not to say that I would have turned into some docile introvert rarely pulling away from the television, but definitely a far less rounded individual. 

Possibly the most beneficial perk of being a son of a Scouter was that we were encouraged to bring our friends along to wherever the weekend happened to bring us.  Not only did my Dad get some free child labor, but we got unabated access to the shooting ranges, swimming pools, and the mess hall.  It was a quintessential win-win for the father-son duo.

On the surface it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if some felt as if I was living a life of luxury and bringing my friends along for the ride.  In reality however, I think the perks gifted from my father’s position just made up for the lack of actual salary.  Regardless, for a blissfully ignorant adolescent that was not a worry I ever had to stress about.  

Being said, we were by no one’s measure rich, especially by today’s standards.  I would normally say we were not “wealthy” rather than not “rich”, but when I was young I couldn’t pronounce my L’s very well.  So when reminiscing on my childhood it’s hard to imagine me using that word then.  So I won’t now.

To put simply, we Mitchell’s were doing alright.  We owned a minivan and Dad had a company car.  We lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a middle-class city right in the heart of central Minnesota.  Which I guess you could call a middle-class state.  All three kids attended public school and my Mom and her friend had their own business cleaning the houses and doing the laundry of the real rich people in town. 

Much later in life I learned of the “trickle-down” theory of economics.  I’m not saying it is necessarily true, I’m just saying.

However there was one thing though that brought us out of middle-class bondage and into the true elites of the neighborhood.  It was this one finite resource that many still associate the Mitchell’s to having few equal.  A resource more precious than gold or silver, especially for anyone whose age was still in the single digits.  We had the biggest backyard. 

If my childhood was written as a sitcom, that yard would become a recurring character of sorts.  Not necessary to tell the main story, but certainly influential nevertheless.

Like adults comparing square footage of their home or showcasing a new Weber grill, us children had to “keep up with the Joneses” in a slightly different way.  Whichever person could accommodate the most friends for those pickup games or midnight runs of “kick-the-can” would see themselves thrust into popularity.  Our backyard became a major inlet into the social pipeline. I had, even if only in my head, become somebody!

Life wasn’t perfect, but life was good.  

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Of course if I really tried, I could find something to begin with that had more drama, but that would be overstating how it actually was.  Sure there were hard times, but don’t get me wrong, the good times certainly outweighed them.  I think some people find it all too easy to focus on the relatively trivial events during their childhood and make them up to be sensational things.  Putting far too much effort into figuratively rewrite parts of their past in some sort of a David versus Goliath fashion.  I don’t necessarily blame them either. 

After all, stories carry more weight when they involve a time when you once fell a Philistine giant with a sling shot.  Unfortunately, most of us did not and will not encounter situations of that magnitude, or giants for that matter. 

What we may have encountered though is a break-up with a middle school sweetheart.  Those tearful days following the note found in my locker felt as if the sky was falling around me.  No amount of video game therapy or parental cheer could mend the tear in my heart.  There went my chances of ever finding true love.  A fatal blow indeed.

Now being older and much wiser, I can laugh at any of those moments as being naive or simply inexperienced in the normal hardships of life.  It might have been the first, but most certainly not the last time my heart ached.  Over the years our hearts build up mighty callouses, even it only figuratively.

The irony I’ve found is that adults often find it OK to dramatize or stretch the truth about events during their childhood in order excuse a current habit.  Acting as some twisted form of “retroactive justification.” The point is that if you had a decent upbringing and nothing was grossly out of the norm, don’t search for something to use as a crutch for a poor decision made later on. 

Children who elaborate about their childhood to the point of falsehood are cute; adults who elaborate about their childhood to the point of falsehood are, well, liars. 

I should probably get something out of the way. Actually, two things.  First, no one likes a drama queen.  Second, I would never want anyone’s sympathy just for the sake of sympathy. 

After all, that would be childish.