When We Were Small

I had a friend who started drinking at 14 and stopped at 24. She held that, approaching 40, she was still 10 years less mature emotionally than she should have been, that the drinking took ten years off of her emotional growth.

"The New Guy," currently 47, survived a brain aneurism when he was 16. He is so childlike that sometimes I could look at him and actually see an 18 year-old. I wondered if some of his growth stopped around the age of his trauma and recovery.

Today, my work neighbor came into the office. This is a man in his early 70s with more energy than a zip car zooming on the kitchen floor. He and Michael had a fondness for each other; Barry had watched Michael grow up as a friend to one of his boys. "I still can't believe Michael's gone," he said. It's just hard to understand." Then he said: "When you have kids, it doesn't matter how old they are, even when they're adults, when you look at them you see the young person they were. You see the child."

Do you ever wonder at which age you got stuck and if you're still fighting your battles with a plastic light saber?

If it's true that on some level every one of us is still a kid at the very heart-- that place so close that when your goat gets got, you go right back to it--then hell, we could rename Congress "Romper Room." We could print Mr. Rogers on the dollar bill. We could have prom over and over and over and over...oh, wait, we do that with marriage and divorce and re-marriage.

How old do you think the president is--at heart? What his momma done make him cock his walk like that? And Osama? Still melting Ken dolls with the fire poker.