I often think that being a child consists largely of being oblivious to the world around you.  Children live in a world within a world, seeing all sorts of things, but comprehending or even noticing only a few.  Children often have no idea why parents make certain decisions, for example, unless those decisions are explained to them.  Things just happen, or don’t happen.  My childhood was certainly this way.  Many reasons and significances I only learned years later, or not at all.  I’ll give one example.  When I was around 12 or 13, my father, an inveterate hunter, took me deer hunting for the first time.  Every year he went deer hunting near Caballo Lake in New Mexico with a family friend and relatives of that friend.  This time he took me with him.  It was very cold, up in the desert mountains in November, but I had a lot of fun (though I did not get to shoot at any deer).  I kind of assumed that this was simply the first of what would be a long series of annual deer hunting trips I would now go on.  But things did not work out that way.  My father never took me again.  Not once.  To this day, I have no idea why.  Had I somehow embarrassed him in front of his friends?  Had I done something wrong?  If I had, I never realized it.  But that was the first and last time I went deer hunting.

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