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Generally agree with the article. The magic never went away. As I got older though I needed more than a blanket fort to amuse me. As I got older I started buil

Generally agree with the article. The magic never went away. As I got older though I needed more than a blanket fort to amuse me. As I got older I started building plastic model kits, balsa airplanes ... my mind went to imaging them as real, full-size. Older still and I could afford a computer and, let me tell you, writing software that could amuse me, the coming of the BBS, and later the internet ... I had ascended well past the plane of blanket-fort. Material means to buy these cooler "adult" toys ... and perhaps a slightly less fertile imagination that could allow a blanket to stand in. Having kids was indeed a catalyst for me to build MAME machines, a dance pad (for the kids you know)... I enjoyed cracking open and reading each night Lang's colored Fairy Tale books to my three daughters, all with "eager eye and willing ear".... As I have become older still (saw the birds leave the nest) and retired — I have wondered a bit about why a sheet of typing paper folded into a paper airplane had as much appeal as it did when I was young. I think the kind of poverty of youth (my single, working-mom, a secretary, sneaking home the paper for me) forced a kind of creativity on me. We all made do with what was around the house. I'm not sure then, as I say, that the magic has gone ... as I say, I just have the means now to large radio-controlled planes if I desire. Like the fairy tales though, when I was younger I had hoped there was a Wonderland, somewhere, perhaps just behind a tree. It was in fact almost painful for me to fill my daughter's heads with fair tales when they were young. I knew on one hand how important they had been to my own imagination at their age even if I knew they were going to be in for a bit of a let-down. My own final let down might have culminated when I was college-age actually. I remember seeing for the first time the "Walking Distance" episode of the original "Twilight Zone" and feeling my soul being shredded. But like the character in the episode, somehow I was able to find merry-go-rounds in the adult world. There is magic out there, I found. It's in people, places I have not yet met or been to. And so too I hope I have also instilled a desire to travel and explore for my daughters.

tpmoney 2y ago
> I have wondered a bit about why a sheet of typing paper folded into a paper airplane had as much appeal as it did when I was young. I think the kind of poverty of youth (my single, working-mom, a secretary, sneaking home the paper for me) forced a kind of creativity on me. We all made do with what was around the house. This may be presumptuous of me because I obviously don't know your head, but I think you've missed the mark here, even though you know the secret when hoping you've passed the magic on to your kids. Exploration. The paper airplane isn't exciting because you have to make do, it's exciting because it's an avenue for exploration. How can I make it go further? What happens if I throw it upside down? What if I throw it from high up? Can I get it to curve? There's also a degree of self competition (i.e. if I can do X can I do X+1?) It's easier when we're younger because there's so many more things to explore and so many things are so new we don't yet know what we don't like to explore. As we get older, we remove things from the list of things we're willing or able to explore, and our level of exploration must go deeper in order to be as magical since we know the surface stuff or can guess it pretty well. I think this also explains why adults can pull magic out of otherwise "boring" hobbies. Think stamp collecting or bird watching. And it's why we can find magic in things we thought were boring as a kid, because we're old enough now to explore what we once didn't understand.

tpmoney 2y ago

> I have wondered a bit about why a sheet of typing paper folded into a paper airplane had as much appeal as it did when I was young. I think the kind of poverty of youth (my single, working-mom, a secretary, sneaking home the paper for me) forced a kind of creativity on me. We all made do with what was around the house. This may be presumptuous of me because I obviously don't know your head, but I think you've missed the mark here, even though you know the secret when hoping you've passed the magic on to your kids. Exploration. The paper airplane isn't exciting because you have to make do, it's exciting because it's an avenue for exploration. How can I make it go further? What happens if I throw it upside down? What if I throw it from high up? Can I get it to curve? There's also a degree of self competition (i.e. if I can do X can I do X+1?) It's easier when we're younger because there's so many more things to explore and so many things are so new we don't yet know what we don't like to explore. As we get older, we remove things from the list of things we're willing or able to explore, and our level of exploration must go deeper in order to be as magical since we know the surface stuff or can guess it pretty well. I think this also explains why adults can pull magic out of otherwise "boring" hobbies. Think stamp collecting or bird watching. And it's why we can find magic in things we thought were boring as a kid, because we're old enough now to explore what we once didn't understand.