Can You Tell Me How to Get....


Wherein Our Heroine Revisits Youth.

I have a theory that everyone has at least one place where they become a kid again. Some experiences seem to be tightly woven to the child in us - allowing us still to experience the thrill of discovery and possibility. In your kid place, you still don't have to decide what you want to be when you grow up - all doors still feel open. For some, their kid-place is the ballet, for others an air show or sports event. Take me to a barn, let me wander around and stroke silky horse noses and I'm six. For my husband John, his kid-place is probably the zoo.

It's always fun going with someone to their kid-place. Their eyes light up and they laugh more easily. The solemnity of adulthood slides away and you get a little time-travel journey to their youth. I can highly recommend accompanying someone to their kid-place if you want to get to know them better. With John at the zoo, there are hundreds of little capsule experiences that range from fear to laughter. In the reptile house we get the thrills and chills of big snakes. The small mammal house is like a wildlife game of "Where's Waldo." Going to the prairie dog mound is like attending a standup comedy routine. Prairie dogs do a "jump-yip" to express danger to their community. Since prairie dogs naturally object to all the people standing around looking at them, they jump-yip quite a bit, often causing them to fall backwards onto their prairie dog bottoms. Go to the zoo and see it - it's a lot funnier in person. But the real kid moment comes at the otter tank.

John has a profound fondness for otters. I think they bypass his grownup persona, his responsibility and seriousness, and go straight for the kid funny-bone and awe. They're clownish and silly, and at the same time they are muscular and powerful. They get to have both the goofy and the gravitas because they are otters - it's the niche they adapted to fit. As people, we have to make choices about who we are and what we want to be. We have to decide what we want to be when we grow up.

I can understand wanting to be an otter.

Posted: Thursday - March 04, 2004 at 10:22 AM         | |


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