August 18, 2025

We were in Westminster, Maryland, for just a few hours to honor a giant. Alan, a leader of men and women who love mountains, had just left us. Hundreds of friends and admirers showed up at a memorial service in his hometown, tucked just below the Pennsylvania state line.

We didn’t hesitate to make the trip. Alan was a tough guy, tough by being gentle, soft-spoken.  He wasn’t an everyday friend, but for years I saw him three for four times a year. A Maryland native, a craftsman with wood, he spent lots of time in Virginia’s mountains. He ran long trail races and did other hard physical things, but smiled at strangers, offered good words to anyone. His life defined kindness, serenity, peace.

We took a new route, I-85 to I-77, which extends north from Charlotte to Wytheville, Virginia, the turn point onto I-81. The Viriginia welcome center host sold us on detouring through Hillsville to visit the Rock Hill General Store on U.S. 100. We passed through Hillsville, found the place and walked through the eclectic offerings of tools, souvenirs, hard candy, along with a tour busload of old folks. We passed on the free soda.

Route 100, the detour back to I-81, winds through another of Virginia’s many stretches of woods and pastures separated by a few fundamentalist churches and gas stations. We sped through Sylvatus and Barren Springs and crossed the New River, at a point before it widens and quickens into white water. The pretty, empty country refreshed us after the interstate truck grind from Charlotte.

Traffic crawled through Harrisonburg up through New Market, a rural rush hour. We exited at Mount Jackson-Bayse onto U.S. 11, which passes through familiar places, Woodstock and Edinburg, Toms Brook, venerable, pretty spots in the shadow of the Massanutten Ridge. We visited with friends Pat and Mike at their farmhouse in Strasburg, just off the Shenandoah North Fork. From their kitchen window they look out at the dark silhouette of 2,000-foot Signal Knob, the northern tip of the range.

On the first morning a few folks from the old Virginia running group gathered at the base of the mountain and set off on the trail, which curls up for four miles in switchbacks more rock than soil. The fast young people sprinted ahead. At the summit I caught my breath and stared north and west at the panorama of farmland out to the West Virginia peaks.

The gravelly fire road dropped steeply into thick Virginia forest. No sound broke the serenity. After a mile the road intersects the narrow Tuscarora trail, which winds, littered with Massanutten rocks, up the western ridge. I breathed hard. At the top arrows on a worn signpost gave directions. I skipped down for four miles and finished alone.

The climb had been planned, but the gasping, out-of-breath scramble over endless boulders seemed somehow the right gesture at the time of our farewell to Alan. He would have been there, had been there many times, on the hard paths of this mountain range and countless others.

Westminster is tucked in farm country hard by the Pennsylvania border. No major roads reach there. The place is known, oddly, as the site of the famous, or infamous farm of Whittaker Chambers. In the darkness of the 1930s Chambers was a member of the American Communist Party. Years later he rejected communism and in August 1948 publicly accused high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy.

Initially no one believed Chambers. He produced documents he had hidden in a pumpkin on his Westminster farm. The documents, dubbed the “Pumpkin Papers,” incriminated Hiss. He was convicted of perjury in January 1950, and served nearly four years in prison.

All that aside, we navigated into Loudon County through traffic-choked Leesburg to the Point of Rocks bridge on U.S 15, which took us to Frederick. From there we guessed our way, groping northwest out into farm country, passing miles of corn, pastures, barns, through Woodsboro, New Midway, and Ladiesburg to Keymar, then east to the fringe of Westminster.

The place is near the Hashawa Hills Bear Branch Nature Center, where Alan and his family and friends spent lots of time. He put on a trail running event at Hashawa in February, when winter in Westminster gets cold, with deep snow. In 2015, when I showed up, it was -5F.

The service was wrapping up but we met with Pam and friends, many young guys and gals and their kids, community folks. Then some with as many decades as ourselves. Paul, Greg, Anstr, Quatro, Kevin had stayed into the last few moments. We talked a bit in recollection, which is what happens at these meetings, but also of new things, plans, work life. Everyone looked well. We browsed the photos which did justice to Alan, his family, and his life.

Slowly, folks made their way to the parking lot and back through the winding green byways of Carroll County. We could have avoided “historic” Westminster, but we plowed through the quiet streets of frame rowhouses and gorgeous Victorians. A fountain ringed by benches and lovely oaks centered Westminster City Park. We parked, I walked a bit through the small-town peacefulness. It seemed to summon thoughts of Alan.

We bore down on the roads, avoiding Frederick, tacking southwest into the maw of Greater Washington. I saw signs for Montgomery County, the nexus of Maryland’s most affluent D.C. suburbs, also of intensely gridlocked traffic, which is I-270. We paused before falling into the Sunday afternoon rush hour. Traffic crawled eventually across the Cabin John Bridge.

Our sojourn into the serenity of pastoral Maryland, just south, really from Hanover, Pennsylvania, came to an abrupt end. We looked back with a bit of regret, it had been too quick, somber yet full of meaning. A good man left us. He brought people to gather in beautiful, quiet places, greet each other with warmth, talk of hopeful things, and move forward.

August 11, 2025

They say when you marry into a Southern family you won’t know what to expect. Who said that? Maybe just me. But the LP record collection—the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Lizt, Verdi, Chopin, Paganini, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky—now is sitting in a cabinet in our living room. It was Laura’s music. That I didn’t expect.   

My wife Sandy’s mother, Laura French Harper, grew up in Cowan in Franklin County, in south-central Tennessee, near the Alabama line. Cowan did not and does not look at all like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. There’s the one main street, a post office, a railroad museum, a couple of churches. There’s no supermarket. There are the out-of-business stores and the shut-down shoe factory.

There’s not much work, and hasn’t been for years. Young people have moved to Nashville or Chattanooga or Huntsville, or at least Winchester, the county seat. Residents are mostly retired people. 

I look back in time, more than 90 years. Life in small Southern places was hard, the Depression made it harder. Laura’s father, Sandy’s grandfather, left home looking for work, for a while he was in Alaska. Like a lot of young people in that time and place, Laura didn’t finish high school. She dropped out and picked cotton in fields outside town.

William, her future husband, left Winchester Central High School (now Franklin County High) at 17, before graduating, to join the Navy. He and Laura got married in 1947. He was 20, she was 19. They settled in Cowan.

They had six kids, three boys and three girls. William worked as an electrician, putting in long shifts at a local plant and picking up extra work around the county. Laura stayed home and kept house and cared for the kids, which is what was done back then.

The years flew by. The six kids grew up and left home, the boys joined the service. The two older girls, Lynn and Kay, moved to Nashville, got jobs, and got married. Sandy graduated from Middle Tennessee State and moved to Nashville, where we met. Soon Laura was a grandmother, eventually a great-grandmother.

In the 1950s Laura tuned the living-room radio to WZYX in Cowan for the twanging, forlorn tunes of the country music pioneers, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubbs, and so on. As a Baptist, she loved gospel pieces like “Old Rugged Cross.” When she left the house the kids would switch the radio to a pop music station, then quickly turn it back when mom returned. To this day Sandy won’t listen to country.

But then at some point the kids started hearing something else: the sweet, majestic, soaring music of Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky. Lynn, the oldest daughter, says Laura began playing classical music when she, Lynn, was about 10. Sandy would have been six.

Time overcomes memory. Sandy only guesses how her mother grew to love the great composers. By pinching pennies Laura found the dollars to purchase the records, probably by mail order or at flea markets. She bought recordings of music’s immortal works: Dvorak’s Carnival Overture Op.92; Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F-Minor, 1812 Overture, and Slavonic March Op. 21; Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major and his nine symphonies; Chopin’s Preludes and Waltzes; Verdi’s Requiem, dozens more.

The recordings include performances by the London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Berlin Philharmonic, and artists including Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Leonard Pennario, conductors Andre Previn, Leonard Bernstein, Herbert Von Karajan, Kiril Kondrashin, others.

At certain hours of the day in the Harper household, the guitar and fiddle plucking on WZYX and the Grand Ole Opry broadcast on WSM-Nashville went silent, replaced by the soaring sound of Beethoven and other great artists.

When we met 48 years ago, Sandy invited me for dinner. When I arrived the sweet sound of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” filled the apartment. Her mom’s love of beautiful music stayed with her.

In the early 1980s the plant where William worked closed, the company moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. William wouldn’t relocate to keep his job. He and Laura sold the Cowan home and moved to Nashville.

When our son Michael began studying piano in elementary school, Laura gave him a stack of classical LP records. I didn’t pay much attention. Michael bought some of his own, and listened to them on an old turntable into his high school years. He went off to Johns Hopkins, then Penn for grad school. The music went silent. The record collection remained in a box in his room.

After grad school Michael settled near Philly. We shipped the piano to his home. Occasionally we used an old turntable, a gift from a neighbor, to play movie soundtracks, pop, sometimes country, Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, that kind of thing.

William died in 1998. Laura spent her last years quietly in the Nashville house. She did come to our kids’ weddings, Michael’s in Pennsylvania, Marie’s in Virginia. She passed in 2014.

For more than twenty years the classical record collection sat untouched. When we sold the house and moved, we packed up the box and took it along. We stacked the records in a cabinet in the living room.

I browsed through the LPs. Some are single recordings, others are series of three or four performances. The cardboard envelopes of some, Laura’s favorites, are worn and dogeared. We bought a turntable. The gorgeous sounds filled the room.

I had learned something about Laura. Somehow in her hard life of homemaking, raising six kids, and worrying about money, she let her heart soar above the small-town Southern universe of honky-tonk country and scratchy gospel pieties, to love the rhythm and resonance of the world’s greatest music. It was, in that way, Laura’s music.

August 4, 2025

I put down David McCullough’s 992-page biography of Harry Truman with a deep breath. The final paragraph reports that “he had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Truman’s wife Bess lived at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982 and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.”

The house at 219 North Delaware, Independence, Missouri, is the Truman house. In 1903 Bess Wallace and her mother and brothers moved in with her grandparents after her father committed suicide. When Bess and Harry married they moved in with Bess’s mother. The house was Harry’s Independence home until he died on December 26, 1972 at a Kansas City hospital.

Three years ago we stopped in Independence on our road trip to Wyoming. We camped out after a long day on the interstate. The next morning we visited the Truman Library, for which Truman spent five years raising funds after his one full term as president ended in 1952. The Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957.

The Truman Library is one of America’s wonders. It tells the story of a humble man, born in rural Missouri in 1884, who failed as a farmer, failed as a businessman, did not go to college, yet became one of the nation’s great presidents.

Truman grew up in Independence and Grandview, Missouri. In 1901 he applied for admission to West Point but was rejected because of poor eyesight. His father’s farm failed, he worked trying to save it. He joined the Missouri National Guard, getting in by memorizing the eye-test chart. In World War I he commanded an artillery battery in France, and met a nephew of Tom Pendergast, a Kansas City political boss.

Harry and Bess married in June 1919. A month before the wedding an Army buddy got the idea of opening a men’s clothing store. Harry put up $15,000 by selling farm livestock. The place opened in November. It failed in November 1922, $35,000 in the red. Fifteen years later Harry was still paying off his creditors.

Even before the store closed, Pendergast drafted him to run for election as a judge in Jackson County, although he didn’t have a law license. Harry won and took office on New Year’s Day 1923. In February 1924 Bess’s and Harry’s daughter Margaret was born. Harry was happy.  McCullough writes that “he loved being called ‘Judge.’” 

In 1934, when kingmaker Pendergast looked to back a candidate for U.S. Senator, Harry was his fourth choice. He campaigned hard through 100-degree temperatures of the 1934 summer. Two other Democrats ran in the primary, all three trading charges of corruption and patronage. Truman won. In the general election, in the solid Democratic state he won in a walk. 

In the Senate, after a slow start, Truman made a name for himself heading a committee that investigated fraud in the defense industry. He won reelection in 1940, swept along by President Franklin Roosevelt’s and the New Deal’s popularity.

Then Truman’s real story began. At the start of Roosevelt’s 1944 campaign, his fourth, Democratic kingpins booted Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket. They judged the junior senator from Missouri the least bad choice. Truman insisted he didn’t want it. Roosevelt, on the phone, told his political people to get Truman on board.

Truman, the hardscrabble dirt farmer and small-town politician and Roosevelt, wealthy New York aristocrat, already president for twelve years, could not be more different. They had met briefly once or twice. After the election Truman barely saw Roosevelt. Then suddenly on April 12, 1945, 82 days after the inauguration, Roosevelt was gone. Truman was president.

It was the man from Independence who led the country through the gathering darkness of the Cold War. In late July he met with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam in Germany to discuss the future of Europe, while the Soviet army held Eastern Europe. At Potsdam, which divided Germany into allied and Soviet zones, Truman grasped the reality of Soviet intentions.

On August 6, four days after Potsdam ended, an American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After the second A-bomb on Nagasaki, the war was over.

When he took office in April Truman had heard only vaguely about the Manhattan Project. He made the decision to drop the bomb based on estimates of 4 million American and 5 million Japanese casualties in an invasion of Japan. He said, “it was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the U.S. side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did.”

In April 1948 Truman established the Marshall Plan to provide emergency assistance to Western Europe. In three years the U.S. sent more than $13 billion in aid. In June 1948 Soviet troops blocked road and rail access to Berlin. Truman ordered resupply by air, the Berlin Airlift. In nearly a year the allies conducted more than 278,000 flights carrying food and fuel to Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in May 1949.

The 1948 election looked hopeless for the Democrats. The experts predicted a Republican landslide for Thomas Dewey. It seemed only Truman believed in Truman. He made a cross-country train tour, speaking to millions, defending the New Deal: Social Security, universal health care, minimum wage. He blasted Dewey as the rich man’s candidate. Election day showed the polls were wrong, the people voted Truman a full term. 

In June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. While the McCarthy “Red Scare” raged at home, Truman sent American troops, 90 percent of the U.N. task force. When Communist Chinese forces attacked in October, U.N. troops were forced to retreat. Supreme Far East Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur urged attacking China with atomic bombs and ignored Truman’s orders. On April 11, 1951, Truman fired MacArthur, setting off a firestorm of protest.

Truman survived an assassination attempt in November 1950. He survived shady dealings by staff people and the McCarthy slanders. But in 1952 he decided not to run again. He tried to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. Instead, Eisenhower ran as a Republican and won in a landslide. During his campaign he declined to disavow McCarthy. Truman saw him for what he was: a politician, and said so.

On Inauguration Day morning the Eisenhowers refused to enter the White House for a cup of coffee and greet the Trumans. Instead they waited in the car.

When Truman left office presidents did not receive pensions. He returned to Independence. Luckily he got a contract to write his memoirs. Years later, on July 30, 1965 President Johnson came to Independence to sign the new Medicare bill, Truman’s lifelong cause.

On a visit to the White House in January 1952, Winston Churchill said to Truman, “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard [at Potsdam]. … . I misjudged you badly. Since that time you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

When Truman ordered American forces into action in Korea, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, “These are days calling for steady nerves, for a strict eye on the ball and for a renewed resolve to keep our purposes pure … . The occasion has found the man in Harry Truman.”

McCullough cites the tributes: Dean Acheson, Secretary of State (’49-’53), called him the “captain with the mighty heart.” In 1948 George Marshall, who led both State and Defense, said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages.

Eric Severeid, journalist and author who observed Truman for years, wrote ” … remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”

Integrity, character, in national leadership. What an idea.

On our return drive from Wyoming we stopped in Abilene, Kansas, on a pouring rainy day and visited the Eisenhower Library. Impressive. Eisenhower was a great general. Truman was a great president.

 

July 28, 2025

Sandy’s birthday came around. “Don’t buy me anything, we’re spending enough money,” she said. We went to dinner with family and friends. She made her own cake, without candles. We sang “Happy Birthday.” The restaurant gave her another hunk of cake, which she didn’t eat. It was a nice evening.

Friends sent cards, the kids called. I drove up to Caesar’s Head State Park, near the state line, looking for something not mass-manufactured. I picked up some South Carolina earrings, hoping they didn’t look too much like the ones I bought last year, also at Caesar’s Head.

The real meaning was the six-year mark since the strokes. We were in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania that day, visiting our son and daughter-in-law. It was the hottest day of the year in the Philadelphia area, close to 100F.

The day before, on the drive up from Virginia, Sandy felt dizzy. Then early the next day, July 20, 2019, her left arm went numb.  “Time for the ER,” our daughter-in-law said. She drove Sandy to nearby Bryn Mawr Hospital, a stroke treatment center. That night she was in the ICU.

The next day, on her birthday, she had an MRI. A neurosurgeon conducted an exploratory cerebral angiogram, which meant inserting a wire fitted with a sensor through her femoral artery into her brain. The finding: several mini-strokes, called transient ischemic attacks or TIAs, caused by narrowing of arteries in her brain.

She went through a week of tests and scans at Bryn Mawr, her blood pressure monitored continuously.  I stayed at our son’s and daughter-in-law’s place in nearby Glen Mills and battled rush hour to the hospital every day. The docs’ consensus: a recent change in her blood pressure medication had caused pressure to drop, restricting blood flow to her brain.

Cardiologists and neurologists who examined her debated the right level for her blood pressure, controlled by medication. Either too high or too low would be risky, as with anyone. Her pressure had to be kept at a higher-than-average level to ensure adequate brain blood flow.

She left the hospital with new prescriptions. In coming months, more appointments, more tests, including a stress test involving a treadmill, a plan for a new lifestyle. A year later we packed up and moved away.

Birthdays are a bigger deal for some than others. They’re important for young kids and their parents, with parties, cake, presents. After the 21st things calm down for most adults. Work and relationships are center stage, life gets complicated. Forty is often a big one, we had people over for my 40th. After that no memories for a couple of decades. Birthdays amount to rushed phone calls.

Years fly by, people start to pay attention again. I put on a surprise party for Sandy’s 50th, the kids came home from school, friends showed up, hugs and photos all around. A priest new to the parish stopped by, he has become a friend. We made a big deal for my 65th, hiring a place for a dinner with music and dancing. Hers was lower-key, in the back yard, her childhood best friend flew up from Atlanta.

The years exact their price. Birthdays become acts of defiance or irony. Am I really this old, is the question. Mortality crashes the parties, no kidding. We know the last birthday party, when it happens, is a lot closer than the first.

Our son drove down for last week’s birthday and stayed a few days. The grandsons had fun with their uncle, who they see maybe once a year. He and I took them out for Chick-fil-lay, putt-putt golf, ice cream. They were thrilled.

He walked around downtown with us, we got lunch, window-shopped. He bought some books, we sat in a quiet tearoom and sipped tea. He cooked dinner, we talked about his work in medical physics for cancer oncology, the patients, the treatments, the tough cases. He made some points about health, fitness, diet, that whole routine, which is his career.

He headed back to his place in Jersey. I thought once again of the symmetry, my life formed there in the urban north of the state, he now settled in South Jersey just across the Delaware from Philly. 

All four of them, the boy and three girls, are keeping pace with us in birthdays, like everyone else. The youngest girl is next, in October, then the grandsons. The eleven-year-old is starting middle school, the younger boy is three years behind him.

Sandy’s big day is still in the season. The health things are center stage. She is getting her early morning walks in, getting to the gym, watching the carbs, as we all should be.

Birthdays reaffirm connections across years. “I’m so glad you have become my friend,” one young woman wrote. “I love you Sandy,” a little girl wrote in her card. The kids, the young adults, the busy working folks are present, so are the old ones, the eighty- and even ninety-somethings, women who she sees at the YMCA senior gatherings, some in tough shape, who need Sandy’s touch of kindness, concern, love, sometimes just a phone call.

We are looking at down time through our South Carolina summer, blasting heat, the grass and trees parched, the air conditioning roaring. The days sometimes seem to drag but weeks speed by, the routine we recall in Virginia and in Tennessee, just a bit worse in the deeper Deep South.

The suffocating days pass, like that hot 2019 Bryn Mawr week, when the docs puzzled over her but found answers. She marched forward across the years and birthdays. This one, with good people near, was special. They are all special.

July 21, 2025

The bounce house, or bounce room, is part of the Greenville, S.C., Pavilion County Recreation Center, a few miles from our house.  The Center is mainly an ice-skating rink, open to the public, also used for practice by the local minor league hockey club. The bounce room occupies 7,000 square feet of the place, roughly a basketball court.

I’ve taken the grandsons a few times. I pay the $19.95, the girl behind the counter fastens bracelets to their wrists. They run for the half-dozen giant brightly colored inflated devices, a couple of which resemble slides that extend nearly to the ceiling. Kids climb a ladder and fling themselves happily down, landing on a soft mat. There’s a sort of maze, a pit full of soft balls, a tunnel, a big round enclosure. Everything is soft, pliable, bouncy.

With several dozen children present the place is bedlam, yells, laughing, crying, with minor bumps. Kids do sometimes miss the mats and land hard. The moms (I’ve yet to see another male) rush over with a hug, a Kleenex, a gentle word. Mostly they sit together chatting or looking at cell phones. I’m at a small table by myself, watching the kids run around, slide, play.

Sometimes my attention wanders. This is not kids’ play as I remember it. Sixty-plus years ago, in my Jersey hometown, we played stickball in the street, dodging traffic. We wandered through the rough woodland behind the neighborhood, a forest probably a half-mile deep and two miles long, well out of sight of our moms. We camped and fished and skinnydipped in a creek that flowed through the woods. We brought home bloody knees, mud, and poison ivy. Once I was sprayed by a skunk.

The woods are still there, declared a protected natural area by the county. Six or seven years ago, my younger brother, who then still lived in the neighborhood, led me on a walk and showed me my name, carved in a fallen treetrunk, along with the year: 1961. Someone had carved “I love” in front of my name–no idea.

Today it’s the bounce house. No one gets dirty, no one gets hurt, no one is out of sight of mom for more than the minute it takes to dodge from one bounce device to another. The $9.50 admission fee is for the entire day, 10 AM to 8 PM Sunday through Thursday, and to 10:00 PM Fridays and Saturdays.

The bounce house offers safe exercise away from the TV and computer games. It’s temperature-controlled, kids aren’t out in the summer heat or winter cold. They’re in no danger of being hit by a car, or of meeting people parents don’t want their kids to meet. They’re not going to tear up their clothes. They’re in no danger of anything. Parents will gladly pay $9.50 for that.

With all those positives, bounce houses are doing a booming business. They host parties for birthdays and other occasions. A few years ago our daughter and son-in-law held a bounce-house birthday party for the older boy, the formula being play, pizza, birthday cake, pictures. Parents drop their kids off, no worries. The employees, usually teenagers or college kids, set up tables, host the party, set up for the next one.

My suggestion for this Pavilion visit was ice skating; skate rental is included in the admission price. Skating offers the same pluses as the bounce house, with the additional challenge of actually skating. The idea stirred memories—my hockey skates and hockey stick, Christmas gifts from my parents so long ago, skating on a neighborhood pond and on a local lake.

They chose the bounce house. Like other bounce-house parents and grandparents, we knew the routine. The kids would get their bracelets and scoot to the giant slides and start climbing. I’d take a seat and watch or read something. It’s the bounce house. That’s what happens.         

So it went for 15 or 20 minutes. Lots of kids were there, some wearing teeshirts from a local day camp. The place was loud. My two were out there, sticking together, up and down the slides, as usual. Then they walked toward me. The older boy asked, “Can we go, grandpa?”

I looked at my watch. I had forked over the $19.95. I thought they’d play for an hour, minimum. They both looked serious. They were done with bounce house. We headed for the door. Near the front desk a crowd of boys and girls were lacing ice skates. I paused and watched for a moment.

We got some fast food. I didn’t ask why they cut the bounce house visit short. But it seemed that those 15 minutes were the same as any 15-minute segment of all previous visits. The kids climb the ladder, slide down, climb the ladder again and slide again or move on to another device. Then the next, until they’ve done them all.

Later I thought again of my adventures as a ten- or eleven-year-old. We were outdoors, the greatest difference with the bounce house routine. If it was raining my parents or my friends’ parents might let us watch cartoons until the sun came out. Then: go out and play.

Today’s kids do play outside. Even the youngest are on fall and spring soccer and Little League teams, with practices and games scheduled, coaches teaching. The kids are in uniforms. Parents pay fees, buy equipment. They sit in the stands or stand on the sidelines, taking pictures, cheering, sometimes groaning. There’s the prospect of advancing to the next level, the middle school or high school team. Then what?

We sometimes see kids tossing balls, or kicking them with each other or with parents, and somehow feel good about it. It could be that the good for our grandsons is that the positives of the bounce house: the contained space, the structured play, the absence of even minimal risk, the near-total parents’ surveillance, just get old. Maybe the kids are over it. Maybe they’ll try stickball.