“Jack, what happened?” asked his mom. He was clutching his hand and on the verge of tears. We were at the Jacksonville Zoo and he was grimacing terribly, as if an elephant had sat on his hand or one of the leopards had snipped off a fingertip. Little chunks of skin flapped in the breeze and I was wondering how long before tiny trickles of blood would bubble to the surface.
“Uh, he fell in a cactus,” I told her.
“He fell in a cactus?” she said.
“Yep, fell in a cactus. He was trying to karate chop me, but with ninja-like reflexes I jumped out of the way and he … um … fell in the cactus. Just … splat! … right in there.”
Yes, I did feel a bit guilty. There is the fact that he’s 5 years old and I’ll be 37 next month — a minor age difference, if you ask me. And there is also the fact that he WAS trying to karate chop me. What was I supposed to do, just take it? And how could I know he would fall in a cactus. I mean, it’s 2010 … who does that anymore?
But that’s what happens when you’re horsing around and you’re five like Jack, or even four, which is my daughter’s age, or in my case 36 and still a kid at heart.
What I wouldn’t give to be those ages again!
Maybe it’s weighing on me more as my birthday approaches. Maybe that next notch on the yardstick of life has me regressing more than usual. I don’t know. But it’s another year away from those days when the only stress in your life was deciding whether to wear the white socks with the green stripes or the green socks with the yellow and white stripes.
That was big stuff for a kid. And I miss it. Could be that’s why I love to mix it up with my daughter and her little friends so much. I love to run and chase. I like to climb fake rocks and jump off, cartilage shooting out of my knees like bottle rockets. I love to hear little kids yell, “Get him” as I laugh an evil villain laugh and shout, “you’ll never catch me dingos!” And they probably wouldn’t if I had the good sense to spot the low-hanging tree branch before darting away from them.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “My nose was too long anyway and could stand a little shortening.”
I don’t know what I look like to those other parents, and frankly I don’t care. Some are grateful that I’m out there taking licks that they would be absorbing. “Oh man, the dude just took another knee in the groin and a tennis racket to the head.”
Others probably think I have issues. They ask my wife how old I am. “Oh, he’s 36,” she tells them. “I see,” they answer. “And so as a child he was enrolled in a ‘special’ school, huh?”
But it doesn’t matter to me. You have to let your inner kid run free. Get some grass stains on your jeans again and grind all the flesh off your elbows once in a while. You have to cut loose.
I envy my daughter, who got her first big kid bike this Christmas. There’s nothing better than riding wild on a bike — the wind blowing past and a high-pitched “Woo-hoo!” erupting from deep down inside you.
Which is why I was dumbfounded the other night at the dinner table when I heard her ask: “Mom, when am I going to grow up?”
Blasphemy! I thought to myself. “Grow up?” I chimed in. “You don’t want to grow up,” and I almost began explaining to her the sad reality of life: That you spend your whole childhood wanting to grow up, and as soon as you do, you spend your whole adult life wanting to be a kid again.
But I knew she wouldn’t understand. As a kid, I didn’t understand, and the inevitable happened. Maybe that’s why I’m always trying to relive it — always up for a chase or a tree climb or a quick game. In that way you can always be a kid again. All you have to do is appreciate a good bike ride and dodge the occasional karate chop that sends a kid into a cactus plant.