My daughter, Loren, and I spent this past weekend at Camp Sea Gull with our Y-Princess tribe (The Crazy Crocodiles) along with hundreds of other daddy/daughter pairs. It was a wonderful, active, fun-filled, magical weekend. We shot arrows from bows and bb's from rifles, we panned for shark's teeth like they were made from solid gold. We ate cafeteria fare in a huge mess hall filled to the rafters with laughter and love and the wonderful noise of memories being made. It was amazing. That place was lousy with kids. Most of them were six or seven, but an awful lot of them were in their thirties and forties too.
Yes; I'm Greg, I'm a kid, and I'm forty-four.
Being a forty-four year old kid can be a mixed bag if you concern yourself with the opinions of others. First, there are the adults. Some of them are going to find your joy at the little things in life a bit strange. Others will find it downright bizarre. A few will quietly decide that it is evidence of some deep-seated emotional or mental problem. Maybe both. Maybe he's a Democrat, they'll think to themselves. And the other kids... there's no ignoring the fact that most of them are still in the single digits when I'm almost eligible for AARP discounts. Kids notice that kind of stuff. In a world where not wearing the right sneakers can land you on the outside looking in, being twice as tall as everyone else and having gray hair definitely puts a question mark after your name.
Years ago—when I was twenty-five, and just a kid compared to the kid I am today—I was playing in the sand at the beach when another kid approached me to check out what I was doing. I'm guessing he was about five. "What are you doing?" he asked, watching me carving a pair of feet out of sand (so it would look like someone was stuck there).
"Playing," I answered.
He puzzled over this for a minute. "Are you a grownup?" he finally asked.
What a cool question, I thought. I answered as best I could at the time; "I don't know."
He puzzled over this for a minute. "How old are you?" my new friend finally asked.
"Twenty-five."
He sighed wistfully, and said, "Yup, you're a grownup." He said it like an oncologist delivering the sad news that I only had seventy years left to live. Seriously, to the five year old, twenty-five puts you on the downward slope to oblivion. It's all over for you. See that tag on your toe, filled out in crayon? Humor aside, at that exact moment I kind of liked the idea that I was grown up. That random child's decree made me stop and think; yes, I suppose I am grown up now. (Of course, it's important to remember that I was playing in the sand at time.)
As time has gone on, I've come to realize that there is a lot inherent in the term grownup that simply doesn't fit me. The great thing, the cool thing, the Saturday-morning-cartoon-happy thing is that you don't have to be grownup at twenty-five or forty-four or fifty-three, etcetera, ad scooby doodum. You can be a kid for as long as you live. (Maybe longer, if certain religious ideas turn out to be true.)
Yes, little Timmy was wrong about me. I wasn't a grownup then, and I'm not one now. Sure, I pay my bills and my taxes, I drive a car, and occasionally wax nostalgic for the way things used to be. Paying your bills no more makes you a grownup than drinking and driving makes you Paris Hilton. Those actions are just functions of managing my life at this stage of my life. I did that when I was three. Of course, at three managing my life mostly meant hiding things; hiding the peas I didn't want to eat, hiding myself in games of hide-and-seek, or hiding the fact that I'd pooped my pants again.
Being a kid transcends the simple trappings of age. The physicist, Richard Feynman, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic bomb. He also worked out mathematical formulas to describe the way a Frisbee flies, figured out how ants tell other ants where you keep your food, and removed doors from their hinges just so he could laugh at the frustration this caused in the grownups around him. He was a brilliant man who did amazing things, not the least of which was remaining childlike until the day he died, despite the weighty times and weightier achievements of his life.
Last summer, when my daughter Loren was six, we two were on our way somewhere in the car. Out of the blue, she said, "Daddy, I don't think I want to grow up. I want to be a kid." From her expression in the rear view mirror I could see that she was serious.
I thought about it for a moment, then I responded, "If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it secret?"
"Yes."
"I'm still a kid." I put it out there like it was a secret; something important that I was sharing only with her. In a way, it was. We talked for a while about the difference (as I see it) between getting older and getting old; which is a lot like the difference between walking and skipping. The great thing was that she already knew what I said was true. She'd seen me being a kid every day of her life. Telling her it was so just allowed me to hammer home the message that being a kid (just like being happy or being sad) was a choice.
At the end of the day, we're handed an age, but we can always choose our outlook, and I'm here to tell you that you could do a lot worse than to choose to view the world through the eyes of a child. Sure you're going to have to endure the occasional comments and glances of the grownups around you who don't understand, don't get it, but you know what they say... "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."
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