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
