Everything moves too slow when you are seven. Everything except Nintendo time.

Seven is an age of pockets. Pockets for things you find, things you hide, things you eat, things you forget, things that parents say you better not leave in the car or else. Pockets deep and unremarkable until you find a soggy pretzel from yesterday, a quarter from an Uncle, candy wrappers that you check each time you re-find them in case one isn't empty. Pockets are mobious time warp machines bridging to the past.

At seven, time is a flashlight sweeping across the day. Mostly it finds boring things. Sometimes it lights up a stick that becomes the bat that sends the rocks cracking off into the yard. Sometimes it finds a frog, the same frog you've been trying to touch for two days and now it sits and watches the world with you.

At seven you can play in a brook and somehow leave a quarter mile of wet footprints on the walk home. Maybe it is because you have slappy feet, just like Gollum. Maybe the secret lies in the water retention of a pocket full of pretzels.

At seven you see the caterpillars bumping across the road. You touch them to see if they feel as spiky as they look and then you wonder out loud if maybe we are all part of a dream that the caterpillar is having.