Growing up is definitely over rated.You don’t discover this until you have kids and then it hits you like a ton of marshmallows.
Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m a victim of arrested development. Or worse, perhaps I’ve caught some sort of “Benjamin Buttons” reverse aging disease.
For example, just the other day I rode the grocery cart like a modified scooter all the way back to my car. Did you know there’s no steering on those things? Good thing they put those little rubber bumpers on them.
Then I caught myself lingering over the bubble gum at the convenience store, finally opting for the one with the comic inside. That Joe Bazooka. What a goof.
More than once I’ve turned off the news in the car and opted for a kids book on tape. If you haven’t heard a good Hank the Cowdog lately, you’re missing out.
At this point in my life I imagined I’d spend a great deal of my time doing all the grown up stuff. Learning about a bunch of dead guys, reading labels carefully to select the products with precisely the right amount of trans fats, or watching the news until facts on world events leaked out my ears.
Instead I’m avoiding stepping on cracks, stopping to see what prizes they’re offering in sugar coated cereal, and whistling tunes from cartoons. I fully expect to start finger painting any minute.
I suppose it was inevitable. After all this kind of thing is infectious. It’s simply not reasonable to expect that you’ll catch your kids’ colds but not their sense of fun.
In fact, this whole thing reminds me of the famous entomologist who discovered the organ that ants use to get others to follow a trail to food. Scout ants lay down a scent trail with an organ in their abdomen.
Of course this entomologist had to go around the country and demonstrate how this scent thing worked. But he didn’t just toss up some slides.
He wrote his name on the top of the table using the scent, then let out a bunch of ants. All of the ants ran immediately over and spelled out his name, following the scent trail he’d written.
Now that’s cool.
Proving once again that in a very real way, lots of us never grow up.
Weeeee!
('course now I feel a little guilty about the ants I'm killing with ant bait in my kitchen. Luckily it's just a little guilty. I can do little guilty standing on my head.)
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