Did You Grow Up?
I’m Not Sure I Did
I have a feeling I didn’t do it right. I don’t think I’m all of the way grown up. Of course, you could argue since I’m 68 years old, the proof is in my gray hair and wild hairs that grow on different parts of my body randomly. I remember I once found a two-inch long, very fine hair on my neck. This was many years ago when, by current counting techniques, I hadn’t quite reached middle age. Now, though, the wild-ass hairs I find are coarse. With my failing eyesight, I don’t always catch them quickly. I’m afraid that’s just going to get worse as the years go by.
But that’s all physical. Physically, I am an old lady. It’s the in the head and in the heart part that I might just still be eight years old.
Like, I still get excited on Fridays. It’s always been that way, long through the years I worked. Even if I had to work over the weekend, Friday held the promise of the weekend. On Saturday, I might sleep in, not get dressed until noon, or have a leisurely breakfast. Friday evenings were fun, too. Still, even today, ten years into retirement, I’ll offer to make popcorn in celebration just because Friday is a special day.
If the rest of my week had been tough, with lots of people whining or making demands of me, and even if Friday at work had been like that, nobody but nobody could take my good feelings away from me on Friday. I was quick to say, “I’ll get over it. It won’t be the same in two hours. Tonight, I get to watch Kojak or Magnum P.I., and my good mood will continue.
See, this is what is interesting to me. If I had a lousy day on Friday and if I had the same lousy day on Thursday and I had to compare them, I would have said that Thursday, hands down, was the more terrible day even if they ran neck and neck in trouble.
One day out of the week that was special. Which was actually a shame. Here’s where the eight-year-old took over and did not realize I could have the same attitude all week. Why did it have to be just one day?
I’m 68 years old, and I just figured that out. That’s what gives me the idea that I never grew up all the way. A grown-up would have figured that part out long ago.
If I had been operating under that principle all these years, think of how much misery I might have avoided.
Current thinking is that older people have had all sorts of life lessons and have become wise. The older I get, the more I think I missed the boat. Many of the life lessons I had I wasn’t able to process until years had passed. Like, what can you learn when you get raped? What tailspin is that going to put on your development? I kept thinking, “I’m okay. I’m still me. I am still me.” That’s all I could do. I couldn’t tell anybody because, in those days, it would have been all my fault. I wonder if that has changed much? I hope so, but somehow, I just know in my heart it might not have. But 50 years later, I am still okay.
I suppose that was the worst life lesson. I’m still here. And I am okay, too.
However, being afraid of everything was also something that affected me. I’m still afraid of spiders. Did you know that spiders can jump? Right, I don’t think that fear is ever going to stop. My husband has gotten it into his head that he should capture the speedy little hairy-legged spiders with a tissue. Then, what does he do every stinking time? He loses the spider. It jumps the soft, cushiony folds of transport to a far safer place and lands on the bed to skitter off the pillows and disappear. Actually, do you know how much courage it takes to get into bed after that? Thankfully, none of them have ever made a reappearance. Lord, but he does make me angry at times.
My father stood on the couch once with his heavy combat boot in hand to kill a four-inch tarantula that was making its way toward my little sister’s crib. The thinking of the day was that children don’t remember shit. Well, guess what? I think they do.
Here’s a consideration about being grown up. You look like a grown-up, so you must be a grown-up. I mean, everybody just figured anybody who looks 30 must also be grown up. A grown-up, to me, is brave. A grown-up, to my way of thinking, is decisive and has a moral code that makes them fair and kind and not ready to watch bad things happen without saying something.
Once, I even tried to help a bad guy. Except, at the time, I didn’t think he was a bad guy. He ran yelling down our street, “They shot my friend. They shot my friend.” I didn’t know who they were, but I could see he had been injured. He was holding his opposite arm up by the elbow. Blood was streaming down that arm. I knew he needed medical attention, and I ran down our steps to the street below to help. He wouldn’t be stopped and kept running down the street with blood streaming from his hand, hollering. It turned out he and his friend had been robbing somebody, and the cops intervened. It was them who had done the shooting. I never did find out what had happened to him.
Another time, I raced down our steps to get between a guy and his girlfriend. The guy was abusing his girlfriend, and she was screaming bloody murder. He was swinging her around in a circle in the carport across the street from our house. I lit into the middle and separated the woman from him. They were both amazed. I hollered at him that he would never again in this lifetime ever treat a woman like that. I wonder if he even understood. Well, he understood enough to stop. She, however, begged me to leave. I was going to call the cops on him. I don’t know what good I did in that situation other than to stop one act of violence from happening.
The consensus of the people I told about that incident was that I should never do it again. Even in those days, lots of people carried guns. But I don’t think I could stop myself from doing it again. That was just wrong. It was wrong, and I was going to try to stop it. Some would argue it was a foolish thing to do. I felt it was the only thing I could do.
Spiders scare me. Bad guys do not. Go figure.