How am I alive?

I guess I started pondering that question right before Halloween. I was combining candies and considered Payday, peanuts around nougat. I started to put it back thinking of horror stories of children and peanuts these days. Then I remembered the peanuts in the M&Ms and the Snickers and decided I wasn't clearing the decks for something parents should review anyway.

Within days, I also saw a report on the growing percentage of children allergic to common things in our world.

It made me wonder, am I lucky or has something gone askew in the human condition? Because when I remember how I lived my childhood, I guess I should be dead.

We ate everything. The kid who was allergic to something was quite the anomaly. School lunches were an assembly line with Sloppy Joe's guaranteed one day and pizza another. Memory fades, but I'd suspect the other three days were top of the nutrition chain and reviewed to be allergy approved.

But it's even worse. I think of the creeks in which I played and sometimes foolishly ingested. I realize the world has gotten generally dirtier in the decades since. But I lived in a burg next to an Air Force base and airplane manufacturing site. Near the creek, they had a dump site which I recall once had an fighter jet tail section. The manufacturing site was also where they developed composites that eventually became the stealth technology we use today. Who knows what all leached out from those operations as they went through failed composites, leached into the creek from which I was catching crawdads on a string with bacon tied on the end.

And then there were my bicycle habits. The bike itself would probably be considered an outlawed death trap. Stingray, high rise handlebars and a gold banana set with sparkles (funny how what was fashion at one time would now get my sexual preferences questioned).

Our daily use of the bicycle would also be considered deadly today and only allowed as an extreme sport with adult supervision with paramedics standing by. We just found the biggest, steepest hill around, put a launch ramp at the bottom comprised of a big rock and a board and went flying.

Most importantly to the overprotective parents today, this is without helmets. In our day, such headgear would be more dangerous than banging your head as it would get you beaten to a pulp daily. I've never quite understood the mandate of helmets when I think of the plethora of bicycle rides for my friends and I, the amazing wrecks, and the dearth of head injuries. I've had friends who've been saved by their headgear as adults, but it seems as though we've legislated for the very few from my own experience. I also find it especially ironic as today's helmets remind me of half of the deadly peanut shell.

Then, there is night. Night is a special memory for me. Even for a child, there came a point in Texas when day just was too debilitating to be outside. But summer evenings were an escape, a chance to burn off energy and see the world in literally a different light. We got to run the streets in the night, and dash through backyards. There were almost no fences for some reason, the neighborhoods weren't cordoned off house by house but an open field. If I lived my summer nights now as I did as a child, I'd be shot within 10 yards. Although no self-respecting parent can allow their child to enjoy a summer's night in a world suddenly full of disappearing children and Nancy Grace trumpeting the failures of everyone but herself which led to the tragedy.

Surely, if I were a child today, I'd be dead. Maybe that reality - or that view of reality - is what makes childhood seem so much shorter these days.