I love looking at the simple things about childhood and growing up.

Have you ever noticed, to a child, everything is categorized as either black or white? There never seems to be a middle, a grey, area in which to categorize anything further. I'm not sure when the grey area develops, nor at what age, only that it does.

To a child, things seem to be right or wrong, good or bad, funny or not funny, nice or not nice, cool or not cool, and so on.

A bad guy is, well, a BAD guy. Dad, on the other hand, is a good guy. A bad guy does things that are wrong. Dad does things that are right. (A mom is another example of a good guy.) Thank God, children most often pretend to be the 'good' guy.

Teasing, even lighthearted teasing, isn't very funny to most children -- but simply say the word 'underpants' and they'll roll on the floor laughing. The same can be said from the opposite angle, too. Something we adults consider to be not funny and even punishable -- "Who blew up the marshmallow in the microwave!?" -- brings muffled giggles from the kid who's hiding-out in his room.

Consider smells and tastes. Nothing ever just smells or tastes 'okay' to a child. To a child, gasoline and flowers smell good, but feet and swiss cheese smell terrible. Brussel sprouts and black jelly beans taste 'yukky', but chocolate cake? As my nephew used to say, "Wow! I could make a whole meal outta that!"

Let's take it a step further. Children like to have easy answers to most things. If there's no black or white explanation or a name for something, they'll make one up for themselves by pretending.

Here's an example: My five-year-old grandson, loves playing doctor with a Bob the Builder doll. He had his toy medical kit and all of the instruments laid out on a table. I asked him what was wrong with Bob. He told me Bob had a bad sickness in his herpodoffick and he was going to take it out with his mixafidgit and that would make him all better.

A tree scratching at the window pane of a child's bedroom at night becomes a horrible snaggle-toothed monster. The child can't see the tree branch. The monster is as real to him as the printing on this page, and until mommy explains otherwise, it really exists. As a matter of fact, it will probably still be there until mommy tells the bad monster to go away.

Looking back, pretending was one of the funnest things about being a child. I loved pretending. I think I put more miles on my mother's broom than she did as I clip-clopped up and down the sidewalk on my black and white pinto pony.

This brings me to the assumption that pretending must certainly be an indispensable precursor to the eventual grey area. When does pretending stop and the grey area begin? I really don't know.

Sometime during the long road to getting older, life slowly expands beyond the black and white. Our tastes change, little mysteries are solved, and we find a lot of our questions can be answered in the encyclopedia.

We learn by experience that our parents are not perfect, that the teacher doesn't have all the answers, and our friend will be hurt if we tell him his feet smell awful. As our whole view of the world expands, we shed our childhood innocence. We pretend less and less and we gently enter into the maturity of the grey area.

I still don't know when pretending stops, or if it ever does. I sure hope not. Heck, I'm still pretending that I'll win the lottery every week.


(This essay first published by Useless Knowledge Webzine, May 17, 2004.)