A date with Ben and Me

Saturday 7/4/26

Fourth of July as a kid, so this was when I was seven, eight, nine-years-old. My tradition as such. Go out and play with friends in a front yard we imagined was some big league ball park. We'd hang a clothesline and drape a tarp or drop cloth over it for a wall. The Green Monster of a field covered in acorns, with trees for bases, and baselines of markedly different lengths. Then swim in someone's pool. Then I'd go home to read Ben Franklin's autobiography. Didn't say what I was doing. More like, "Okay, I'm off, see you later." I loved Franklin and Colonial history. (At night, in bed, I was apt to read a Three Investigators novel. There was never a time after I was able to read that I didn't read in bed until I went to sleep.) Couple hours of that, and then it was back outside for what could be more sports, bike riding (and doing jumps), or going into the woods. Maybe I'd have a catch with my dad. I'd say on the whole that parental interaction was minimal. I had things to do. Ways to be. AT night, on special nights, there could be a big game of flashlight tag which was scary and exciting in equal measure.

Imagine if this was what everyone did? Nature, sports, reading, thinking, independence. Because that's what those Fourths of July were made of for me. But that was also the stuff of a regular summer day. Can you even conceive of how much better the world would be, how much smarter we'd be, if this is how it was for people? Had been? You can do a version of this every day even when you're a long ways away from that time and place that has passed.

But people don't do that, do they? They don't read. They can't read. They sit. They let their brains fog over such that they can't even recognize the fog on account that it's their permanent state. They make their kids to be just like they are. They stare at screens. Adults and kids alike. The idea of learning? Please. You gotta be kidding me. This was the most normal thing in the world to me. There wasn't fanfare. I wasn't told to do this. I thought nothing of it. It wasn't hard. I didn't need the genius part of me for this. Was dead easy, and it makes so much difference.

I certainly wasn't discouraged. I would have been discouraged from sitting on my ass like some lump. I remember on one of those Fourths of July the 1953 film Ben and Me--based on the book of the same name about Ben Franklin and the mouse who supplies him with his best ideas--was playing on TV. I looked it up.

I was always looking for stuff like that. I liked The Swamp Fox with Leslie Nielsen (and Patrick Macnee, who had played young Scrooge in the Brian Desmond Hurst film I later wrote a book about) as well. Good title song. Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail on his hat/Nobody knows where the Swamp Fox is at. And of course my eyes were always peeled for Universal horror films.

You had to stay vigilante or you might miss your chance. But your brain was involved. You had to remember. You had to make a point of looking. You used your brain as a matter of course at the time in ways that no one does now. People used their brains to all kinds of different degrees, but my point was that you had to use it some. That's how the world was. The world now is set up so that you don't ever have to use your brain. It added up, that brain usage in the past. People were different than they are now because of it.

I remember walking home from someone's pool, towel in hand, just me, because I wanted to keep that date and see Ben and Me. No one watched with me. I loved that short film. Then it was back to it.