When you were young and your heart was an open book.... ---Paul McCartney, theme to Bond film, "Live and Let Die”
Our elementary school was named for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but our hearts belonged to Bond. James Bond. We were 12. It was 1965, and McCartney, later, had it only half right. Our hearts were open books, but we were at the movies.
Admittedly, we were fickle with our attentions back then and our Bond moment was brief and involved just a few of us. Here’s how it happened. On paper drive day, our job was to unload stacks or bags of newspapers delivered by parents north of the schoolyard on Norris Street. One of our crew had seen Goldfinger and he told told the tale of Bond as if it were his own. We were spellbound, at least until impatient parents started honking their car horns to turn our attention back to the task at hand.
Now, imagine four young boys lifting the bags of old newspapers from the backs of station wagons and stacking them along a chain link fence with the energy and drama of Bond eluding Goldfinger’s sidekick, Oddjob. It might help you understand our state of mind if you paused and listened to the famous bond theme music. We never moved so quickly. We lifted, carried, and stacked with the panache of 007. At least we thought we did.
There was nothing frivolous about us. Our imaginations had taken us to another world, and that’s the point. We would be lucky if such spontaneous imaginative moments came to us all our lives, because much depends upon them. I think I was blessed to go to school with a particularly bright and imaginative cohort, from elementary school through high school.
Several became writers, actors, or musicians. Others, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, care workers, all professions that require imagination in one way or another. Any work that doesn’t probably should. Like I said, we stacked bags of newspapers with imagination.
I didn’t know then that I would one day write for two of the newspapers that filled those bags. I would work on the other end of an assembly line that led from a reporter’s notebook to a copy editor to a printing press to a paper boy to a kitchen table, and from there to a paper bag in the garage to a station wagon to Norris Street north of Longfellow Elementary School, and finally to the paper recycling place, wherever that was.
Every link in that chain is filled with imaginative possibilities. Think not? Did you ever have a paper route, tossing papers with some game in mind? How far up the yard can you throw it, how close to the front door? Can I hit the spot I hit yesterday? Will that pretty girl I saw last week be standing on the porch waiting for me? That’s imagination.
Who invented the printing press or the essential job of copy editor? Who thought up station wagons? All were first imagined by someone.
There is much in American schooling that seems intended to shrink our imaginations. That wasn’t the case back then. Post-war optimism and innovation as well as Cold War, Sputnik-fueled fear placed a premium on teaching us to think critically about how to get out of the next mess we might find ourselves in or how to nurture possibility and opportunity. Some might look out on the world today and question just how well we handled the messes and opportunities, but that would be unimaginative. Better to be open to wonder and see if new creative solutions appear.
Most of the kids I grew up with are still at it one way or another. You never lose the habit of imagination once you have it. And, anyway, the door to opportunity never really closes. Like the title of another 007 movie, “You Only Live Twice.” This dream is for you.