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Children have only to dream and have fun and laugh 400 times a day

The song was on a small, plastic Golden record, which all U.S. children had a million years ago when one small record could entertain you for days, maybe weeks, because we didn't have so much back then and we didn't need so much to make us happy.

It was "In a World of My Own," from the Disney cartoon, Alice in Wonderland. "Cats and rabbits/ would reside in fancy little houses/ and be dressed in shoes and hats and trousers/ in a world of my own." Alice sang as she daydreamed on a perfect summer day.

Even way back then, when I was a child and had nothing to escape from, no obligations, no things I had to do, when life's biggest problem was whether to spend a newfound dime on ten Fireballs or a Little Lulu comic book, the idea of a world where animals talked and "the biggest problem would be things a child can understand" bewitched me.

It bewitches me, still. For all of my life, come August, I have found myself humming this childhood tune and wishing I could be, at least for a while, like Alice, a little kid with nothing to do but dream.

My grandchildren make this possible, sometimes. They can't turn back the clock and make me a child again. But they do slow me down. They take my hand and lead me away from work and worry and responsibilities and into their world.

They’re the reason I’m sitting on the couch smack in the middle of the day, reading for the fifth time in a row Bear Snores On. (“Can you read it again, Mimi?”) They're the reason I'm at a farm feeding chickens and sheep and goats at 9am, and eating a chocolate ice cream cone at 10am. They’re the reason there are pails and shovels in the car. And quarters for the rides at the “Walka-Walka” mall in the ashtray. And the words to “The Wheels on the Bus” playing over and over not just on the CD in my car, but over and over in my head.

I have this dream and it's not about world peace or ridding the earth of disease or righting all the terrible wrongs. It’s about a universe of people who don’t have to work or shop or cook or fold a towel or take out the garbage or pay a bill or sweep a floor or pull a weed or tend to anyone or anything at all for one entire day.

A world full of people whose only obligation is to dream.

Children do this every day. I watch my grandchildren. They lie in a field of grass, blue sky overhead, listening to birds sing their summer songs and the cicadas hum their summer hymns; they smell the heat and feel the haze and chase butterflies and grasshoppers by day and count the stars at night. They fly kites and ride waves and picnic in their own backyard and search for hours for a single four-leaf clover.

If only adults did these things, too. If only we got to take an intermission from what we’ve grown up to be, and be children again.

We’d watch cartoons instead of the news.

And eat Corn Pops instead of Special K.

And go barefoot. And sleep late. And stay up late. And smile. And laugh.

My daughter told me recently that children laugh 400 times a day while adults laugh only 15 times. "Impossible," I said. "This can't be true."

But then I started counting.

Children laugh at everything. Even tears are followed by laughter, hurts quickly forgotten.

But adults? We're so consumed with the world and its trouble, with what we hear on the news and read in the papers and see in each other's eyes, that even in August we barely laugh at all.

My grandchildren sit on a wall. They dangle their feet in a brook. They lie on a patch of grass. They stand at the ocean's edge and watch the sun set.

Not worrying. Not planning. Not anticipating. Simply BEING. Breathing. Existing. Absorbing.

This is what August begs, that we become like children and do all these things, too.

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