When did you lose your childhood innocence? When my buddy was in elementary school, his parents

would take him to Toys R Us, where if he was really good, he could choose one toy. He would

peruse the entire store before making his important selection. On one such trip, he selects a 36-piece

magic set. It's a bit costly, but his mum justifies it because he's been particularly good in

the last week or so.

On the way home in the car, he sits quietly grinning with his magic set in his lap and

wonders how the kids at school will react once he reveals to them that he, in fact, knows

magic.

Upon arriving home from the toy store, my buddy races off upstairs to

finally learn some magic. Keep in mind that he thinks he's on the verge of being a legitimate Harry Potter

here. After about 20 minutes, he comes downstairs dragging the box behind him, walks up to his mom

with his head hung quite low, and asks her if it would be okay to take the magic

set back to the store. His mother, concerned with the defeated look on her child's face,

asks him, why? He looks up at her and very solemnly states, it's not real magic. It's just, it's just

a bunch of tricks. When I was in about first or second grade, I was an imaginative kid. My grade school was in front of a big wooded area in suburbia. At recess, I started telling my friend about the man who lived in the woods. Things like, oh, you see that tree stump? That's his stove. And that fallen over tree? That's where he set up his house. Similar thing to looking at the clouds and seeing dragons, you know? In my head, he was a Rip Van Winkle type of character. Pretty soon I had a bunch of friends who had come and listen while I talked about the man in the woods. This ended badly when one of the kids mentioned this to a teacher, and I ended up in several hours of interviews with the principal, teachers,

and guidance counsellors over whether there really was a creepy man in the woods hiding there,

praying on the school's attendees, and whether I'd been mistreated by him. I'd never heard

most of the things they were talking about. I kept saying it was just a game I made up,

but they couldn't believe a kid would bother doing that purely for fun.

That pretty much killed the innocence right there.

You know what killed my childhood innocence? The bubble jets in the swimming pool. Those frickin' bubble jets in the swimming pool. Ah. Probably the time my father showed me his swollen testes

after his hernia surgery.

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