1927

I sit in the park and look at their sweet and perfect little bodies running and jumping and hopping and skipping and laughing and never worrying and never caring and not concerning themselves with what things are going to be like tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after that. They don’t know what life is going to throw at them and they simply just do not care and that is something else that I find that I can love about them. And I do love children.

Free of disease, free of convention, free of mind and free of desire they invent worlds that none of us could even imagine and live within the cracks of the fantasies they synthesise for each other without question or criticism. Even sitting here on a bench in the middle of a hot April day I can smell fecund young imaginations and thoughts that breed and multiply as only they should. They know nothing of dull laws and understand nothing of egregious shame or what it means to live under the weight of lifetimes of accumulated adult desires and wishes. I admire their souls, I approve of their spirit and I am in awe of their perfect little bodies, unblemished by anything that the mind can construct.

And those bodies! No saggy skin on them, no blotchy disfigurements, baggy eyes, spots, baldness, bent backs, fallen arches, limps, aches or pains in them. Nothing but children running in the grass without any sense of the wonder they cause in me; boys and girls in running shorts and t-shirts showing their lovely young limbs and firm and undeveloped torsos. Soft hair, gentle eyes, kind affection and an unquestioning loving embrace.

Great spirits above, let me taken them away from this place and show them the better things that their lives have not yet shown them. Let them not fall from their innocence quite yet and let their virtue carry mine ever higher. Let me remove them from the inevitability of them ever becoming older boys and girls, and instead let me take them away and hide them from their own fates. Let me show them love. Let me show them whet a real and loving father can be like to them all. Let me lift them up and carry them on – let me show them the business edge of tomorrow.