I grew up in a time before life was ruled by screens. We had one television but there were only a few channels. Our television set had an analog channel changer that sounded like a bad transmission when you went from channel 4 to channel 7. There were only a few times a day that things came on that kids wanted to watch, which corresponded with the beginning and end of the school day. The rest of the time, we were on our own when it came to entertainment.

Amazingly, we were hardly ever bored. There were certain activities, many of which involved ill-advised and often dangerous uses for illegal fireworks, which should probably stay in the past. But there are a number of things we did as kids that I wish my own kids could do with the same enthusiasm and spirit that existed in the time before social media and streaming video.

Saturdays were the best. We could wake up when we wanted to, and there would be chorizo, eggs, and rice for breakfast. Saturday morning cartoons were the first order of business. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Fat Albert ruled the airwaves. We knew it was over when professional golf came on, and that meant it was time to go outside.

My house was one of the last in the development. Only a few houses down stood a vast open field, now occupied by homes that routinely sell for over a million dollars. That field, just a giant swath of grass broken up here and there by brown patches of open dirt, was a place where anything went. Sometimes it was a battlefield, or a sports pitch, or a racetrack. It was anything we needed it to be at the time. All it took was a little imagination. On that field, we could be anything and do anything. We were pirates and police officers, soldiers, detectives, knights, motorcycle racers, astronauts, sheriffs, and any other thing that popped into our heads. It was a place where our imagination would run wild.

When the sun went down, the fun didn't stop. There was flashlight tag and hide-and-seek, and we never worried that someone was going to come and snatch us. That's also when many of the aforementioned activities involving the dubious use of gunpowder took place, but it's best not to dwell on that.

It's better to think back on the freedom we had as kids growing up in the '70s and '80s. It makes me sad to see how much we've lost since then. Evil, whether perceived or real, restricts our kids from enjoying the outdoors the way we did. But the self-imposed prison of social media and constant access to mindless entertainment is just as insidious. In 1978, the childhood obesity rate was about 5 percent. Today, it's almost twenty percent. If that is progress, then you can have it.

I'll have my vacant lot and my fireworks back, thank you very much. We should all have a vacant lot, even if it's just in our heads, where we can do what we did so effortlessly as children; dream, imagine, and invent. Allowing ourselves the opportunity to try out new ideas is even more important when we consider the obstacles we face in the economy. Sometimes it takes a little imagination to see the rewards that lie beyond the obstacles and, with a little hard work, blaze a trail to reach them.