I saw a meme on Facebook last week that made me laugh. It said, "We were wrong as kids. We should never have wished to grow up."
Ain't that the truth.
Back when you were a child, life was so much simpler than it is as an adult. This is true for several reasons. First, you didn’t have the pressure of having to earn a living or dealing with traffic or worrying about your cholesterol.
Because of this, you could devote most of your time to important things, like playing hide-and-seek or building a fort in the woods.
You could go fishing or ride your bike all the way down the Suwanee Swifty convenience store to buy a bag of candy and an RC Cola. You could take your shoes off and play in the mud. Or you could stay inside and lose yourself in the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy in the Hardy Boys books.
Yes, life was uncomplicated. If you had a question you wanted answered, all you had to do was find a grown-up, because you just knew that grown-ups had all the answers.
But one day, you realized the Hardy Boys just didn’t do it for you anymore, there was no one to play hide-and-seek with, and then all the stress of being an adult sets in. Unless your name is Buffett or Rockefeller, you must go to work and earn a living. And then you have to figure out how to pay the power bill, the gas bill and the grocery bill and still have money left.
When you’re an adult, you have to go to the doctor for a regular physical, and when you get to a certain age, the doctor starts poking and prodding in places where no body ought to be poking and prodding.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that when you become an adult, you realize that you were wrong when you were a child. Grown-ups don’t have all the answers. In fact, we have very few answers.
Adults certainly don’t have the answers for the important questions, such as for the love of God, why can't people just put on a mask and actually think about other people for one minute so we might put this pandemic behind us.
But we don’t even have the answers to unimportant questions, questions that nonetheless keep me wondering. For instance, why are there locks on the front door of the Waffle House? The place never closes. When do they lock the door?
Speaking of locks, why do so many convenience stores lock their rest rooms? I could reach across the counter and put my hand in the cash drawer, if I were the kind of guy who’d do something like that, but I have to get a key to go to the bathroom.
Why? What’s in there to steal? If you’ve been in some convenience store restrooms lately, you know that you don’t even want to touch anything, much less steal it.
I worry about why our society seems so obsessed with celebrity news. I'm fully convinced that one day, I'll turn on the TV and hear the anchorperson say, "World War III has just started in the Middle East, but before we get to that, here's our top story: The Kardashians are acting trashy again."
See? The stress of being an adult is tough. Makes me long for the days of hide-and-seek.
