One recent evening, my wife and I were walking in our neighborhood. As we walked by the next yard on that block, my eye caught just a glimpse of the boomerang that lay half hidden in the pile of leaves that had been recently heaped up in the median, waiting for the city to pick them up. In that moment, my mind flashed back to a memory of a sunny fall day with my dad.

I was 10 years old, savoring this day with my dad. In and of itself, it likely doesn’t seem like this should be one of those significant moments that we pull up from our memory bank. It needs some background and some clarification. We were a family of six kids all growing up on the family dairy farm. The general order of things was you get up early and the milking and barn chores begin. If it was winter, you needed to finish up in time for breakfast, get dressed for school, and head off into town. Three o’clock and school gets out, you head back home and repeat the morning cycle of chores, finish up by supper, do your homework, and then off to bed. Summer at least gave us a little variety to the daytime routine. No school meant we had time to get the field work done.

Now do not think all we ever did was work. As a boy growing up, I had my brothers and we were crafty enough to find some play time in between or even while we worked. That last maneuver was one that drove my dad crazy.  I still could hear his voice yelling up to us in the hayloft, “If you worked as hard as you play, all the chores would be done.” Of course, that wasn’t true because there was always something else that had to be fixed, moved, changed, mowed, or whatever. There was an endless supply of chores.

The one truth in all of this work was that though we were sometimes given a little leeway for playtime, dad never really got any. As you can tell, the life of a farmer was and still is a dawn to dusk operation. As a result, I have very few memories of time spent playing with my dad.

This day was different. He had found my crude attempt at making a slingshot. My first thought was that he was about to confiscate it. Instead, he eyed it over, gave it the “good effort” comment, and then to my great surprise and complete delight said it was time he showed me how to make a proper sling shot. I was going to spend quality time, I didn’t know that was what you called it, with my dad making the perfect slingshot. As he explained, we first had to find the right ash tree, and not any old ash, but one with just the right branches. They had to form this perfect “Y” shape, not straight edges, but rather more of a curve where the arms met the handle. I remember hiking through the woods together. In my recall of the memory, I can still smell the dogwood trees and hear the whisper of the trees as the wind moved the branches. It took us the better part of the morning before we found “our perfect ash tree” and even longer for me to shinny up into the branches to retrieve that special one. But that did not bother me. I savored every minute. I was having “not working time” with my dad.

Rubber straps carefully cut from an old bicycle innertube and the stone pouch fashioned from some old cowhide; my slingshot was finished. My weapon of mass destruction, as I prefer to remember it, was ready for firing! After a few shooting lessons from dad and the obvious warning from mom that the moment I broke a window, it would belong to her, interpretation, it would be firewood, I was armed and dangerous.

The good memories are like a warm blanket. They wrap around you and fill you with nostalgia. It is often some place or thing that triggers the memory’s release and you go back in time to the moment or moments that created the memory. That boomerang did what boomerangs do, they come back. For me, it brought that memory back.

There is a second memory associated with that boomerang. This one is not as old, but it is just as rich. My grandchild, Jackson, was maybe six years old. He had seen a boomerang on a TV show and came to me with the question of how could it come back after you threw it? We researched boomerangs. We looked at drawings of how the very exacting curve made it fly in an arc. Finally, we watched YouTube videos on how one needed to throw and release the boomerang. Saturday afternoon arrived none too soon and we were off to the park. Jackson and I must have thrown that boomerang the equivalent distance of a half trip to the moon. Did it come back? Not exactly. But Jackson stuck to it, and eventually, with a little going halfway to meet it, he caught it. I hope that one day, something will trigger the memory of that day for Jackson. When it happens, if it happens, I hope he will remember a day spent playing with his Opa. I hope that he will remember the feel of the grass on his bare feet, the whoosh the boomerang made as he threw it, and that wonderful moment his hand snatched the boomerang from the air as it actually returned!

If there is a lesson here, it would be taking time from work to play. Play with your children. Play with your grandchildren. Make a memory. Make it one that will boomerang back to that grown child so that they can relive that special day when they realized you could still just play.

I will close with a thank you. First, thank you to the child who forgetfully left his boomerang in that leaf pile. But even more importantly, thank you dad. Thank you dad, not just for helping me make a slingshot, but for taking the time out of work that day just to play with me.