Just My Imagination

   When I was a kid, I used to love to lie down on the floor under the Christmas tree and look up through the branches and watch all the lights and the reflections in the ornaments, imagining they were all distant stars and planets, each celebrating Christmas.  Occasionally, my dog would join me and, although I’m not sure he was thinking of stars and planets, we would both gaze upward, captivated by the whole scene.

   One Christmas, when I was probably nine or ten, I got the coolest flashlight.  It wasn’t like a regular flashlight - a skinny tube with a light at one end and a switch on the side.  No, this one was round, like a cookie about three inches in diameter, and about a quarter of an inch thick - probably just barely enough to get AAA batteries inside.  The light was on the side and the on/off button, as I recall, was on the top (or bottom, depending how you looked at it).  It had a sci-fi look and feel to it.  I loved it.

   I would sneak out of my room before anybody was up and prowl around the house, drawn to the living room where the Christmas tree stood in its piney-scented splendor.  I’d plug the lights in and once again let my imagination take me away to other worlds with other kids and their other-Christmas celebrations.

   That year, though, we stopped getting the newspaper.  Missing the house once in a great while was no big deal.  My dad would call down to the newspaper and somebody would drop by with a paper, apologizing for the inconvenience.  But this happened several days in a row.

   Finally, the paperboy came by to collect and asked if we were okay.  My dad was puzzled, and the kid said he thought we’d been burglarized and had been too scared to deliver the paper because he thought the burglar saw him and would come after him.

   Putting two and two together, my parents figured out that the “burglar” was me, creeping about the dark house with my cool new flashlight.  I guess once or twice I must have shined that light out the windows and right into the paperboy’s face.

   I guess I wasn’t the only kid with a good imagination that year.