Patio Bricks

When I was a kid, I loved going to Long John Silver’s restaurant. Not because the fish and hush-puppies were pretty tasty, which believe me they were and in my opinion still are, but because they gave me gold doubloons with every meal! Each toy coin had an image of a different pirate, and I just knew that they were made of real gold! When you’re 8 years old, it’s easy to imagine things are worth a lot more than they really are, and boy was I certain that those plastic coins were one day going to be my ticket to everything that a little boy could imagine. Every time I got one of those coins, in true pirate fashion, guess what I did with it? I buried it! Buried each and every coin under a different patio brick, mapped the whole thing, and then buried the map until I was old enough to cash in all that gold and spend it on whatever I wanted without my parents telling me what I could or couldn’t spend it on. Oh yes, I was the Captain of my ship, and the perfect Pirate!

Well, the years passed, we moved away from that house when I was 17, I grew up, and somewhere along the way completely forgot all about my treasure. Now I’m almost 40 years old, and the other day, while I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean the memory of my childhood treasure came flooding back like someone just punched a hole in my bilge. For a split second, I had this urge to run out into the backyard and start pulling up patio bricks and collecting my booty! Of course, that backyard and those coins are over a thousand miles away now. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know if the house is still standing, and even if it is, I bet that those patio bricks are long gone and my priceless plastic gold doubloons have been buried again and are now resting on the bottom of a sea of trash in some dump on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. It doesn’t really matter though, because when that memory hit me after all these years, for a moment, I was an eight year old Pirate again! And if only for a second or two, I remembered a feeling that I forgot to remember a long time ago. That feeling was just enough to make me realize that buried under each and every patio brick of life – fatherhood, marriage, failed marriages, careers, financial responsibility, blah, blah, blah – is a treasure created in the imagination of a kid that was never cashed in, only forgotten. I believe everyone has buried treasure out back that’s just waiting to be dug up and taken to the bank. I think it’s about time to set sail again before Davy Jones makes us all walk the plank!