Sans Fig Leaf
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"Magical things"
24 November, 2003
Several years ago one of my nephews loved to play with his dad's computer, but he was a bit too young to really operate it. So he would sit in someone's lap at the computer desk, and whichever of us was the lap, would fire up one of the games he liked, show him what keys to press, and he would play.
Of course, he couldn't read, yet, and only vaguely understood that each button on the keyboard was different. So after a while he would no longer be pushing any of the keys that made anything happen on screen. At which point we would show him the keys again, and get things moving along.
One day, while he was sitting in my lap playing one of the games, his mother started talking to me about something. I wasn't paying as close attention to him and the screen as I had been. So I didn't realize that he was over on the wrong keys, again, and getting a little irritated. Until he grabbed my index finger, pulled it over the keyboard, and started pushing buttons with my finger.
This made all the adults laugh. It was a perfectly logical thing to try. My fingers always seemed to make the screen do interesting things. His didn't. Therefore, my fingers should be used to push keys.
Some time later I was present when his mother was telling this story to someone, and the person responded, "Oh, to be a child again! When the world was still full of marvelous new things to discover!"
Without thinking I replied, "The world is still full of marvelous things. I discover them all the time. You just have to keep your eyes open." Which seemed to kill that topic of conversation altogether.
I had forgotten that not everyone looks at the world the way I do. They don't see themselves as explorers in an infinitely unfolding universe. To them, life has very specific boundaries of expected behaviors. You graduate. You settle down. You get a career and/or a family. You arrive. After that, it's just going through the motions.
For me, those milestones aren't destinations. They're the beginning points of new journeys.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I sometimes feared that I would grow up to be that sort of an adult--all serious and cynical and completely convinced that they already know everything that's worth knowing. Any time I feared I was drifting into that mind set, I would remind myself of my maternal great-grandparents. They were never afraid to have fun. My great-grandfather was the one who used to tell us kids "never let the revenue-ers rain on your parade." He'd been a bootlegger during prohibition, so he had spent part of his life dodging federal agents trying shut down his stills and distribution operation. To him, "revenue-ers" were anyone who tried to force their definition of proper thinking on others. Not that he advocated being a scofflaw--unless you were really convinced that the law was wrong.
Great-grandma occasionally made comments to the effect that she regretted their wild youth together. But no one would have ever accused her of taking life too seriously. I remember one Sunday she decided to attend the service at a church that was closer to her house than her preferred church. Afterwards, she said she wasn't going back to that church. "They're all so serious and gloomy in there! Worship is supposed to be joyous." She was fond of saying that "If God hadn't wanted us to have fun, he wouldn't have given us laughter."
I remember one afternoon with them in particular. I was fifteen, and great-grandpa wanted some help cleaning out a storage shed behind the house. I did a lot of lifting and hauling, that day. There were lots of strange things out in that shed. Some of them prompted my great-grandpa to tell me a story. When we were finished, we took some of the things inside, where great-grandma had some ice tea waiting for us.
For the next couple of hours they told me stories about things they had done. An amazing number of them had been pranks that they'd pulled on someone or other; some of them not all that long ago, either. They laughed and laughed and I couldn't help but join in.
There was also talk about things they still wanted to do, someday. Trips they wanted to take or places they wanted to see. They sounded amazingly like a much, much younger couple--right down to the sweet way they would sometimes interrupt each other to say, "I love you!"
I especially remember the sparkle that would come into my great-grandpa's eyes when he was looking at great-grandma. It was amazingly similar to the sparkle I saw in my nephew's eyes the first time he kicked my butt playing a console game. Or the twinkle I see in my godson's eyes when he's telling me something new he's just learned or discovered.
It's all the same magic. That's why I can't help being thankful for what I have: wonderful, loving friends, a husband whose smile still makes my heart skip a beat, and a whole world full of magical things.