BREAKING SPRING

Nudity. Wild demonstrations of testosterone fueled rooster crowing. Uncontrolled eating, drinking, and merry making. Occasional incontinence. Unadvised physical feats of leaping about, followed by crying, screaming and a high probability of projectile vomiting. Episodes of naked gyrating.

Spring break?

You’d think so but no. It’s a weekend with the grandkids.

Many in society look on the nude, naked, uncontrolled, incontinent merry making of spring break as a right of passage for college types and a few convicted felons—incognito. They look back on their own nude/naked incontinent merry making with fondness, when they can remember it; sometimes it’s just flashbacks.

Which is confusing to me.

When you’re a twenty-year-old frat boy, it’s cool to poop your pants.

When you’re a two-year-old baby boy, it’s disgusting.

It makes no sense.

I watch the wild, raucous spring breakers on television, and think that if I saw my nearly adult kid swilling alcohol through a tube, I would stop payment on the checks immediately. Let them pay for their own emergency room bill and penicillin.

Then I watch the endless, tireless efforts of my grandchildren learning to walk, and think to myself, “Now that deserves our investment.”  They cling to furniture, fingers, and their own hands. It gives them courage. They teeter on uncertain legs. They totter trying to manage wobbly first steps. Then they fall. And fall. And fall. They are under no influence but their own, dogged persistence.

Over and over and over and again . . . they fall . . . and get back up.

And then they GET BACK UP and try it all over again until they can walk. It’s quite inspiring to watch. They never quit. Never. Over and over and over again . . . until they can walk.

Of course, our society calls having children “a punishment” or a “twenty year life sentence” or says of them that “they ruin a women’s body” or “they keep you from doing stuff” like traveling to Panama City for spring break where you wind up unconscious on someone else’s beach covered in starfish. 

I guess. 

Of course, when those children, who’ve ruined your body and punished you with their presence, are twenty you can send them to poop on someone else’s beach.

Irony.  It’s everywhere.

Linda (Spring Fling) Zern