Remember mud pies?

Do you know of any kids out there who are making mud pies? Have you seen any kids lately with stained hands, dirty fingernails or a smudge of wet dirt across their shirts or faces?

See, I don’t think that children are making mud pies anymore. But where would they find the time for such a simple childhood pursuit? They’re too busy with computers, iPods, video games, DVDs and 200 channels of television at their disposal. The expiration date on mud pies, even in the South where we are mighty proud of our dirt, is many years out of date.

What a shame that is.

My childhood was country simple. It consisted of things now considered boring by most kids. It was filled with adventurous romps with my dogs – just plain yard mutts who ate table scraps, never saw a vet and yet lived to be old – hundreds of books, joyous afternoons splashing in the creek, sewing clothes for my Barbie, running barefooted though the newly plowed garden where the cold red clay crept delightfully up through my toes, and making thousands of mud pies scrapped together from hard soil, moistened with creek water and molded perfectly into old tin plates that Mama had thrown out.

One of the greatest treats of my simple childhood was shopping at the A&P, which had a spin rack filled with Golden Books. Mama, who can be as tight as a waistband after a big Thanksgiving dinner, never quibbled about buying books for me. She rarely wasted money on junk food, but any book I wanted was mine for the asking. As soon as we entered the grocery store, I’d race over to the rack, spin it and study slowly until I picked a book.

The bookmobile, designed to bring books to folks in rural areas, stopped at my house in the neighborhood, for no child was more grateful than I. Even now, I can let my senses take me back to the paper and leather smell of those wonderful books that crowded the aluminum shelves of that endearing vehicle.

And whatever happened to bookmobiles?

They’ve gone the way of mud pies, out-of-date with a world of children too busy to spend a lot of time reading. Oh, but the joys brought to me by Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Nancy Drew. The summer before the fifth grade, I read “Gone With The Wind” and was downright sorrowful when I reached page 1,036. I hated for it to end.

You’d probably be hard-pressed to find even a college student who has read that industrial-strength tome now, not to mention an 11-year-old.

It may sound old-fashioned but I believe that creeks, adventures with dogs, books and mud pies still have important places in this world. See, such simple pursuits call upon the use of imagination and observation. It requires absorbing the world and fantasizing about the possibilities. It calls on reaching deep down within to create your own entertainment.

And that, after all, better prepares one for life. How many of life’s complex problems can be solved by an iPod? Battling life demands imagination and observation, the kind of skills that can be learned from making mud pies and reading books.

Going through childhood photos recently, I discovered something delightfully profound – I was an enormously happy child. A tiny girl with reddish brown hair and chubby, freckled cheeks that were always puffed up into a huge smile and brown eyes that positively sparkled. There were grinning snapshots of girl and collie, girl and books, girl and loving family, girl dripping with creek water, girl on a carnival ride. It was so simple.

I was deprived – if that’s what today’s kids would call it – of high tech stimulation. Still, I believe my childhood was picture-perfect. Looking back, I like the way it looks.