For my Granddaughter's sixth birthday present I told her I would take her anywhere she wanted and and she could do anything she wanted. Without a blink she said she wanted to go to the Discovery Zone. I had no idea what a "Discovery Zone" was, but if it made her happy I was for it. We piled into my car and headed out.

I pulled into the DZ parking lot and opened the car door. Pandemonium! Children were shrieking, bells were ringing, gongs were clanging, and the loud thumping of Rock and Roll music filled the parking lot. I looked at my granddaughter, Amantha. She was struggling with her seat belt and simultaneously trying to open her door. To my fifty-seven-year-old ears it was bedlam. To Amantha, it was the Siren's call.

She jumped out of the door and shot across the parking lot bounding like a colt in a sunny pasture. I grabbed for her arm, but she was already halfway to the door. She might've leveled the young attendant standing inside, but he saw her coming and scooped her up so quickly her legs were still churning.

'Not so fast, young lady,'� he grinned, 'You better wait for your Dad.'� Dad? Well now! I straightened my shoulders and picked up my stride. I even smiled when I paid the entrance fee.

Inside was a child's fantasy world. Slides and swings and bars and ladders and trapezes and mazes filled a huge room. A cage, filled three feet deep with colored plastic balls, sat in the middle, and above it all, a four-foot-high tunnel wound around and climbed and dipped and offered side routes with high platforms and ropes to swing from. Amusement machines, with lights flashing and buzzers buzzing, lined the walls, and everywhere, children; all sizes, all shapes, all colors, running and screaming and laughing. In the middle of it all, safely roped off, was the parent's viewing area.

Amantha tugged on my arm. "C'mon, Grampa," she said, "Hurry."

The attendant put our shoes into a basket, assigned an I.D. number, and handed Amantha a handful of tokens. Then she was gone, disappeared, into the teeming crowd. I found her working an apparatus which launches a ball into holes that grew progressively smaller toward the top. She had already won a strip of tickets as long as my arm which she handed to me and commanded in her sternest six-year-old voice, 'Hold these, Grampa, and don't lose 'em.'

I know authority when I hear it. I took the tickets and followed, one dutiful pace behind her, from machine to machine. She racked up scores faster than my brain could compute while lights flashed, bells rang, numbers spun, and the machines spewed tickets. By the time she ran out of tokens I had ticket strips hanging out of every pocket.

She took my hand and pulled me through the crowd to a long glass counter that displayed bins of candy and probably every Cracker-Jack toy known to man. She ran up and down the counter oohing and aahing and pointing out every plastic gee-gaw inside. Finally she traded her tickets for an enormous bag of bite-size Tootsie-Rolls. I had no idea how I would justify all that candy to her mother.

"Here, Grampa, hold these. You can have one," Amantha handed me the bag and headed for the playground. An attendant marked her bag with our I.D. number and put it in the basket with our shoes. I retired to the parent's area and sat down to munch my Tootsie-Roll and watch the kids play.

'Grampa, Grampa! Watch.'� I heard Amantha's voice above the din. I watched, horrified, as my tiny granddaughter emerged from that huge snaking tube onto a platform, grabbed a T-bar hanging from a rope, and jumped. She rocketed down a slope, dangling and kicking, and slammed into a huge slab. I caught my breath. She jumped up smiling. It was foam-rubber. She let go of the T-bar and fell into a jumble of the foam-rubber blocks. I caught my breath and leaned forward until she bounced up, beaming like a gymnast.

'Watch Grampa.'� Oh, Oh. I steeled myself. She stood at the door to that cage filled with the colored plastic balls and threw herself in. She disappeared like a duck in a pond. This time I smiled and waited. And waited. Seconds dragged by. My smile froze. Here and there little heads popped up, then disappeared, but none was Amantha's. I started out of my chair. She burst out of the pile in a shower of plastic balls, hooting and laughing as if she'd done something clever.

'How would you like to show Grampa how to play the bowling machine?'� I yelled. My words sounded choked.

'Come play with me, Grampa.'�

I glanced around at the other parents. 'I'm too old, Honey, I'm too big. I might break something.'� I said.

Out of nowhere an attendant appeared. 'Don't worry, Sir,'� she said. 'The equipment was built with adults in mind.'�

Actually, it wasn't their equipment I was worried about.

The other parents were smiling at me. I felt like Daniel in the lion's den, but I climbed a little plastic ladder and squeezed through a tiny door into that long, twisting tube. I followed Amantha on my hands and knees trying to keep up as she scurried down the tunnel, scrambled up a short ladder, scampered through a boxy little room, and down another ladder. I followed, determined to keep up with her. My chest was heaving, my knees were protesting, my back was on fire, and perspiration was beginning to stain my shirt.

Then Amantha disappeared.

When I found her, she was laughing. She thought she was having fun, but my face was red, my breath was coming in gasps, and my hair was plastered to my scalp. She looked at me with her lips pursed and her hands on her hips.

Sheesh, how had she become such a taskmaster?

She climbed another ladder and jumped through a square opening. I struggled up the ladder, squeezed through that impossible opening, and found myself on a familiar platform. A T-bar hung from a rope and to my dismay, I realized where my diabolical little granddaughter had led me.

'You first, Grampa.'�

'Thank you, Amantha, but ladies first.'�

'No, Grampa, age before beauty,'� She said.

I have no idea where she learned that.

'Oookay. Well...' Off I went flying down the slope, dangling like a side of beef. Wham! I bounced off the foam rubber slab. Whop! I hit the pillows. I lay still for a moment and felt no pain. I patted myself down and smiled. 'Hey, that was fun! Let's do it again.'�

Seconds later Amantha landed beside me and said, 'This way, Grampa.'�

No problem.

I passed on diving head first into the cage full of plastic balls, but I tried every other device in the place. I was having so much fun I forgot to be self-conscious. Then I noticed other adults crawling through the tunnel and sliding down that T-bar slope, and jumping into the cage. They were all sweating, their chests were heaving, and their feet were dragging, but they were smiling and they were laughing.

Later it occurred to me that whoever had coined the name 'Discovery Zone'� must have had us stodgy, inhibited old adults in mind. They wanted us to discover how to have fun, real fun, as in pure, gleeful, unrestrained fun. Kids already know how.

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