By By Lee Weyhrich
I spent most of my time as a child playing outside. Rain, sun or snow I was outside all the time. Whenever I could I would run around barefooted and climb trees, play in streams, run through sprinklers and otherwise keep myself occupied.
We only had about six channels on our TV and cartoons only came on from about 1:30 p.m. until around 4 p.m. on weekdays. And Saturday they were on from 4:30 a.m. until whenever Soul Train came on.
My average day now begins when I drag myself out of bed after beating my clock radio to the point that the DJs have concussions. I work until my brain no longer functions and then go home to bed.
Occasionally I get home early enough to watch TV for an hour or two before I'm ready to go to sleep.
My nights seem to last about 15 minutes and weekends last about an hour.
The Beach Boys did an album called Endless Summer. As a child my summers seemed just like that, endless.
Now summers are just the time of year when I don't feel like leaving the comforts of the air conditioner for any reason and they seem even more endless, but not in a good way.
As a child there were long summer days spent exploring the world and evenings spent hunting lightning bugs to be put in glass jars for the night. Now I can't even remember the last time I saw a lightning bug or a jar that wasn't plastic for that matter.
Half the children I know can run full blast from dawn to dusk. I'm lucky if I can make it from the bed to the kitchen without wanting to take a nap. Half the time I feel like a toy with run-down batteries.
It amazes me how each year gets shorter than the last and each year the old stories seem better than the new.
It's amazing how an hour as a child was enough time to play a million games and an hour now is barely long enough to bother with starting one.
There's this image in my mind of one of those James Bond style rays that is sucking time away from everybody as a maniacal genius and his ridiculous henchmen laugh at us.
The weird part is I can even remember days as a child when I was bored and I remember my parents saying that one day I wouldn't have time to be bored.
I didn't know they were psychic.
Lee Weyhrich is the Managing Editor of the Atmore Advance. His column appears weekly.