Childhood?

School was over, it was a Friday, and I was more than ready to get home. I swung my heavy backpack over my shoulder and grabbed my violin, heading out the door to the bus. I habitually thumped my violin case against my knee every other step I took along the way. As I stepped up onto the bus, the second to last one in the seemingly endless line of yellow, I greeted my bus driver and made my way to the back of the bus. As I tried to avoid stepping on lower schoolers’ toes that were sticking out of their seats into the aisle, I overheard one first grader in the front row the bus. His bright blue eyes and blonde hair like corn silk looked so young and carefree that it made me miss being that age.
“My homework for this weekend is to play outside, get dirty, and to hug someone in my family,” he told a girl who was sitting next to him, his young, blue eyes shining. As I took my seat, I thought about what the boy had said. It made me long for childhood again. I could hardly remember days when I had fun homework like that, when people could just see the youth and innocence shining through my eyes, when life was simple and everyone was my friend. Out the window, trees, houses, and buildings rolled by, but I couldn’t get what that boy had said out of my head.
For that boy, life was a simple. He didn’t know about the ugly, destructive, parts of the world. He didn’t know the extents of homework. He could be friends with anyone, be it a girl his age on the bus, or someone who shared their crayons with him. He didn’t need to know about the complexity of gender, race, or religion.
What I really wanted to do at that moment was to tell that boy to enjoy life at that time. I wanted to tell him to live it up, because life wasn’t always going to be like that. Then I thought about what would happen if someone told me that when I was his age. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t understand what they meant, and if I did, it would scare me. I realized that there’s no use telling people to enjoy their moments, because the enjoyment comes from within themselves.