It’s about time someone writes about this all-important topic, and I will do my best to do it justice – justice – the opposite of fun. I have an advantage in writing about this topic because I’m retired (mostly), so I don’t have the pressures of work, commuting, multiple bosses, or the desire to get a promotion. As a matter of fact, Epic Systems called me back in October to come back to them part-time, and instead of working in the kitchen, where I was learning to be a chef (it’s mostly about knives and playing with fire – kind of like Boy Scouts), they wanted to promote me to something administrative. I shuddered at the thought and told them, “No, it’s the time of year when football and basketball intersect, and I have no time for work, although I might consider it, if you let me go back to the kitchen. I lost the ten pounds I put on last spring working with the chefs.” It was mostly a lie; actually, now that I look at it, it was probably three lies in two sentences.

I also enjoy the advantage of having a grandson, who is three years old. No one understands fun like a three-year-old. He lives in a world of magic, where a large box only looks like a cardboard box; it is actually a rocket ship. His dad put stick-on lights inside because every rocket ship has to have electronics. On a walk to the park on a recent visit, he tugged at his Nana’s sleeve until Ann followed him around the corner to see his secret knot-hole (shades of To Kill a Mockingbird), which he pointed to and said, “Owl.” It was a double knot-hole and really did look like an owl. On his last stay with us, I pushed him around the circle from our living room to our dining room to our kitchen and through a hall back to the living room in a plastic car just his size. Every time we got to the living room, he waved at a two-foot high statue of St. Joseph that Ann inherited, and said, “Hi.” Each time, he was very happy to see his old friend. If you have young children or grandchildren, you have your own examples to supply here. Write them down somewhere so they aren’t lost.

I’ve written elsewhere that I believe time is not linear, but is layered, and below my 64 years are layers leading back to three. I believe I can still access most of them. I am three again every time I pick out a musical birthday card for our grandson that blares “Funky Town,” or “Shout!” when he opens it. Even if you don’t have a grandson, you can remember when you zoomed around the house wearing a cape, when you made a wire hanger into a basketball hoop over a door and tossed sockballs at it, or when you thought it was the greatest fun to build a fort on a rainy day out of cushions, pillows, and blankets draped over coffee tables, so you could safely lob sockballs at your enemy brother. We lost a lot of socks in our family.

My memory is not limited to the world of our grandson. Twenty-five years ago, our daughter had a dress-up box of princess gear, doctor kits, Viking helmets, magic wands, a boa or two, and ballerina skirts. Her theatrical presentations were epic. She saved entire worlds. Our son favored action games, usually involved in jumping off things, a tendency that gave us some worry when he took up skateboarding. I thought he had some kind of injury-wish until I took him for the first time to a skate park, and saw that it was actually a team sport where any successful trick, even something basic by a beginner, was cheered by all other skaters, as if he just dunked a basketball over Shaquille O’Neill. That’s when I understood what was really going on. It was team fun.

Fast-forward to NOW. I read about an elderly man whose son bought him a self-propelled lawn mower with a grass catcher because he felt sorry for his father who would spend hours raking the clippings of their large lawn every summer week. On his next trip, the son was sad to see the new lawnmower had been used, but without the grass catcher that would save his father so much effort.

“I have a confession to make,” his father told him. “You know I’ve always been a history buff. Every time I cut the grass, I rake the clippings to re-enact some famous battle. Today I did the decisive Battle of Yorktown. Cutting the grass no longer is work, you see. It’s -”

“-fun,” his son said. “Now I get it.”

“It’s like doing a crossword puzzle,” his dad said. “I re-live what I know. It feels good.”

One of the things I’ve learned is that fun does not depend on the activity; it depends on the attitude of the person. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some people in the world who think that sitting in a rowboat for four hours watching a little red and white bobber go under or not go under to catch a scaly, finny critter is boring. It’s not the activity, which is actually wonderful fun; it’s the person. I’ve even heard that some people would not enjoy putting on waders to slog upstream and cast tiny, feathered hooks at trout, usually unseen, and there isn’t even a little red and white bobber to watch. It’s all done by “feel.” Who wouldn’t enjoy that? It makes me wonder what’s wrong with some people.

I have a friend who is thrilled by spotting birds through binoculars; another who loves searching the internet for re-manufactured parts for a mint MG convertible which sits in his garage and is driven twice a year on sunny, summer days before the township rocks, tars, and paints lines on streets to get ready for the opening of school. There is an army of people who hit golf balls at a tiny hole in the ground, and they feel good, not if they get the ball in the hole in the ground, but if they can do it in fewer attempts than the guy who designed the minefield they play on. I have friends who think it is fun (read “chemically high”) to run when no one is chasing them. Then they put oval stickers on their cars that don’t even have words, just “26.2.”   My favorite was a beat-up car with a rather seedy-looking, unshaven smoker inside with the sticker “00.0” on his bumper. Even doing nothing can be fun.

I’ve heard there are people who have made a game out of plastic bag hunting and earn bonus points in their competition by retrieving bags from the tops of trees, barbed-wire fences, creek bottoms, and yards with dogs. I hear they use extension poles, rappelling lines, casting rods, and even drones with hooks. I can’t say that any of these people are my friends, but I’ve heard they’re out there. Inspired by them, I have tried to make an enjoyable game out of hunting dust bunnies under beds and dressers, but have not succeeded. I need a casting rod or dart gun of some kind, so I can say, “Take THAT, you little furry rascal!”

We make fun. When I proposed to my wife long ago, it was in a beautiful wooded spot, and her answer was punctuated by a nearby woodpecker, knocking away on wood for good luck. More than three decades later, whenever either of us hears a woodpecker, we text the other. “Good luck for us.” If we’re together, we smile and hold hands again. Now that’s fun.

If you’re not having fun, you’re not creating it. Nothing is more fun than the act of creation – or re-creation, for that matter. Writing this is fun, even if no one reads it. If you study a piece of music or memorize a poem, it is yours forever, something you can re-create whenever you want. That’s why I used to memorize one line per day with my students and repeat all the ones we owned on the first day of every month.

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote….” – Chaucer

“How do I love thee; let me count the ways….” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment….” – Will Shakespeare

“When you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire….” – W,B. Yeats

“Tree at my window, window tree….” – Robert Frost

“Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole….”

– William Ernest Henley

I have friends out there who can still recite all of these lines and the dozens that follow. Today, they smile when they do it and get a shot of some brain chemical or other.

I think it best to conclude this important blog with the best four-word philosophy I’ve seen on the subject of fun. It’s from a bumper sticker on a dirty old car on the way to a coffee shop where I enjoyed writing this. You’ll get the idea.