Sad Little Lies

28^th December 2011

Dear Cassi,

    

Do you ever recall from your youth one of the more obvious lies you were told? After my parent’s divorce every other weekend my father would come over and sometimes he would take us to the “park.” What he meant by the park was the playground of the local grade school where we would find ourselves the only weekend visitors.

    

To this day I still think of parks as rather lonely places. I have no memory of children laughing and playing in them. Then, by the time I went to school laughter wasn’t something I was known for given my depression.

    

I do recall asking what the school building was before I turned five but I have no memory of what my father said. The old man said a lot of things designed to screw with me and that idea that messing with kid’s heads is funny never got old for him.

    

Why we insist on lying to children I have never been able to understand. I never believed in Santa or the Easter Bunny, and I never put teeth under my pillow. You could say that I had a bad childhood, I would, but would it have been made better by these lies? Can there truly be all that much wrong with being honest and clear to the young?

    

Today week keep our children as fools unaware of that the world is like, but when do they grow up to learn the truth? The truth is ugly, and the tender nature of children should be spared that grief. Still, need we lie; need we paint the world in rosy tones so that as they age they can see those tones fade into the dim of reality?

    

If we spent all the effort put into the lies of our world to making reality better we could have a world with brightness. Once more, if we banished from our lives those sad little lies we always tell ourselves maybe we would be better to one another.

Stay safe, Cassi,

Richard Leland Neal