Childish Things

Isn't the second line of the second verse supposed to be "with my fishin' pole and my Field & Stream" referring to the outdoor magazine?

this song is about giving up your past and accepting that you are older and one day will die....i like the part about the wolves, to me it means that evenn though he gave these things the "wolves" are still inside him and still run free......"they wont stop and they wont go home"

This song is really sad when you think about it. It's about a man who has reached middle age and has lost his ideals. You have to follow the whole sequence "I'll put away childish things/I've put away childish things." "Heaven" represents these ideals--the good things in life. But he still believes in ghosts. "Ghosts" can mean whatever traumatizes him, whatever skeletons are in his closet.

Thanks for the lyrics, and it's good to see some comments too. This one's been going through my head on and off for the last few weeks. At first, I was understanding it about like shgdhshfds--just a song about growing older and finding your skin thicken a bit around the scars of life. But the more I replayed the lyrics in my head while sanding my old hardwood floor, the more I saw it like Susan does--this is a sad song. It's about dying while you're still alive. You can't ask for a more literal representation of selling out than "to sell all my stock and live on the coast." The phrase "childish things" comes from I Corinthians 13, the famous "Love is patient, love is kind" chapter. That reference serves to highlight the irony of suggesting that putting away childish things means only wanting a comfortable chair.

What about the second verse? Seeing too much from the bus window, calling parents by first names, and not playing the game anymore. I follow the arc, but I don't have any specific insights into that verse. Calling his parents by their given names... as Aunt Clara did? Does he spend every other weekend with his aunt in the country?

Great song. Leaves me wondering which is the true childish thing: heaven or ghosts.

In regards to the second verse, "looked out the window till I saw too much", I take this as him just observing things in general for long enough and he finally starts viewing life in a different way. And not necessarily in a better way than the innocent, curious way that he did as a child. He started figuring everything out for himself and realized things weren't as joyous as they once seemed. As for calling parents by their own first names, maybe its just me but I have noticed a few people that I have known a while eventually wind up calling their parents by their first names...just something that happens with age. And in the alley, when you were a kid, did you ever have a game or certain thing you did for fun that you never thought would grow old or it never even occured to you that it would grow old? I guess the game didn't really get old; he did.

Sooo...I got to this song because of Sarah Jarosz. That octave mandolin...I swear! Having said that, the lyrics immediately needled in my mind because something seemed familiar. Then it hit me...it's a CS Lewis quote.

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - CS Lewis

Read that last sentence again.

If that connection is correct, then the song is about a child wanting to be an adult in the eyes of a critical adult (Aunt Claire)... "That I'll still believe in heaven but I won't believe in ghosts anymore"

But then the dawning realization that, as an adult, you don't have to be grown up to be in charge of your life...and maybe there's some room for childishness in there...and maybe you shouldn't care if anyone else does. "I don't believe in heaven but I still believe in ghosts"