After reading Jacob Holmes’ article in The Messenger titled, “Pokemon Go,” I had more questions than Carter had little liver pills.

What is a Pokemon? What do they look like? Where do you buy them? “Who puts Pokemons in all those places for people to find?”

Jacob was polite in explaining that Pokemon is an app and, from what I gathered, nobody “puts” them anywhere they just bounce off satellites or the Planet Mars or the front end of a Chevrolet Impala and show up on those electronic brains “hip” people carry in their pockets. Pokemons can show up anywhere at anytime and so, to find them, people with little else to do, have to get off their couches and wander around in life in search of them, actually physically explore the world around them.

The real trick would seem to be to keep the Millenniums from running into lamp posts while their heads are buried in their tweets and twitters.

So, as my granny would say, I studied on the situation for a while and kept going back to the words, physically exploring.

I find it odd that, by chasing around these Pokemons, people are going to “explore” the world – a world that is actually larger than the  4.5-inch screen on their iPhones. Well, it’s about time.

When we, the Baby Boomers and members of Generation X, were physically poking around the world, we discovered many amazing things—grasshoppers of different colors, slugs that gooked on you and spit devils that would spit in your eyes and put them out. We were fascinated by chameleons that would “throw their money” and then lie perfectly still while you stroked under their chins. We searched for a Praying Mantis that would bring us good luck and bugs we could doodle out of their holes and a June bug that you could fly like a kite if you tied a string to its leg.

We caught tadpoles in the shallows of the ponds and watched them grow into frogs that inhabited the frog houses that we made by backing wet sand over our bare feet. Then we would pull our feet out to make a place for the frogs to hide. We chewed billy goat grass and sipped the nectar of honeysuckles. We ate wild grapes, blackberries and mulberries and rode sapplin’ trees.

We made wishes on flower petals and by blowing dandelion fluffs. We picked ditch lilies and black-eyed Susans  for our mamas and powdered our noses with dust from buttercups.

We knew dozens of bird calls and how birds reacted when a snake was in the bushes. We knew how to coax a turtle’s head out of the shell and call a crow and rattle a rabbit out of its hole.

And, at night, we had lightning bugs to wish us goodnight and we fell asleep to the serenading of crickets and katydids.

Elliot Wigginton edited a book titled, “I Wish I Could Give My Son A Wild Racoon.”

I’m  so thankful for the wild raccoons in my life and wouldn’t trade a one of them for all the Pokemons in the world.