This morning I went to a place that I hadn't even thought about in probably thirteen years. I went back to my old elementary school. You see before I moved out to Manvel, before my mother died when I was six, I lived in Spring, Texas and I went to school right where my nephew goes now.
Of course, that was all fourteen years ago. And now I fee old, fourteen years. From the moment that we stepped into the cafeteria it was kind of creepy. I mean when i think of that place everything was so huge. I was so tiny. I remember not being able to see over things, and now those same things barely reach my waist. I remember it taking forever to walk down those halls after recess but because my stride is bigger now the walk is barely even registrable as a walk.
I took my nephew this morning because of the Donuts for Dad's event that was going on at his school. His dad, my brother was out of town on account of business. Funny though, they were doing the exact same event when I was his age and my father couldn't make it, the price of having a dad as a doctor. I suppose sometimes I think that I wish I had more time with my parents, you know before I got to that age where I realized half of what they told me was bullshit and that they annoy the Hell out of me.
But I wonder what the me back then would say if he met the me now. I don't even think little kids know what to say. Their minds don't work the same, they're more abstract. And the world they observe, even though it might be the same world we observe, is a much happier place when you don't have over a decade of grief backing it up. When my mom died that was probably when I realized that bad things didn't just happen on television. And that when bad things happened they weren't resolved in thirty minutes with time enough for commercial breaks.
I used to watch a lot of Nick at Night when I was a kid, now there is a world you would want to live in,want your kids to live in. All of that wonder and hope, all of the problems ironing themselves out in one or two episodes. No grief and best of all, no shades of gray. Because the shades of gray are what really get you in life, the areas where its hard to tell right from wrong and your moral compass is going berserk.
Life, well life now, seems to just be marked by a series of down points and the areas of gray fogginess. And the trick, I've learned is to learn what down points to dodge, which ones you can't and how to take a hit. Through all of this gray fog you can't see far ahead and some things aren't always morally spelled out.
