What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

As kids, my neighborhood friends and I would play elaborate games of pretend. One game was “Little House on the Prairie,” based on the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We would turn my friend Carolyn’s bed into a pioneer wagon and pretend we were heading west. Calamities would befall us, especially stagecoach robbers. We were always getting attacked.

Here’s a Halloween photo from that time period that I happened to pull out yesterday. I was a cowboy that year. Thinking back, that would certainly fit with my “Little House on the Prairie” obsession.

The magic of books that transported you to a world that you wanted to recreate and inhabit is something that “kid at heart” conjures.

“Little Women” is another book that we liked to act out. We would pretend we were playwrights and write & perform mini-plays.

I remember being so excited when my son built himself a tree perch in which to read “The Swiss Family Robinson.” I knew he was feeling that book magic.