Great cedar tree, Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, 1897

What I miss most about childhood is the sense of fantasy and wonder I had about everything. When I was a child, every day was a summer afternoon, I was never too hot or too cold, never hungry or thirsty.

That's all a lie, of course, one that my memory has concocted to placate my frantic adulthood. There bad days, of course, but I don't remember them. There were below-zero days when the snow piled against the house up to the windows. There was thirst. There was hunger. Not just a hunger for food, but a hunger for other, less tangible things.

But not in my childhood, of course. The world was a magical place, where everything was better. The food tasted better. The air wasn't just cleaner, but lighter, crisper somehow. When I walk through the supermarket I see a lot of products marked "New & Improved," but they're not really. They can never be as good as they were when I was a child, because not only can I not be a child again, I can't be the child I imagined myself to be.

I had no worries, no unease, no sense that everything was not right with the world. No paradoxes of memory like this one.

It is amazing how selective one's memory can be.

But seriously, if anyone knows what happened to the snack called "Pizza Wheels," please let me know.