Still Growing Up

I'm 57 years old and that is a true fact, at least according to important official raised-seal type documents.  But what do they know - dusty, papery, yellowed documents.  The truer fact is I don't FEEL Fifty-Seven.  Fifty-seven feels a lot older than this.  Right?   I mean I thought I'd be a whole lot wiser by now and way more knowledgeable as to how the world really works.  Oh, and I thought I'd be really mature by now too with really mature and sophisticated opinions that I could pass off as Facts at the drop of a hat.  And I certainly thought I'd be a good bit more cynical and way less gullible and definitely prone to over-analyzing everything and being a giant scoffer of things.  But, that isn't what's going on. Yet.  Maybe it will sometime later, on down the road, but for now I'd have to say that at 57 years old, I'm still growing up. 

This was again made crystal clear, this being fifty-seven but not feeling like it, just a couple days ago when I was at a matinee movie with my on-spring-break-son Steve.  He and I were on a "date"  -  lunch and a movie, just the two of us, 57 year old mother and 19 year old son with Down syndrome. This sort of outing with my Steve is rare.  Lots of dominoes have to be in the right place for this to fall just right.  A two hour block of time is one domino.  Another domino is the absence of the impromptu, inexplicable stomach ailment as the young movie-goer settles into his seat in the theater. Yet another domino is the movie itself, specifically, the rating of the movie. 

As a rule, PG, maybe PG-13, is about as risky as we go when venturing to the movie theater with Steve or his 17 year old brother Tom.  It's on account of their propensity for parroting spicy words and R-rated phrases!  The two of them, teenagers with Down syndrome, have a spicy-word radar mechanism that kicks in anywhere words are spoken - they hear it all in school hallways and cafeterias, the ball park, and the grocery store, the car next to us at the stop light on a hot, windows-down summer day, even the long line behind us in the Christmas-time post office - words just fly everywhere, anytime, in real life.  I suppose the provocation behind the words should be taken into account, but my boys don't do that; they don't analyze or dig for cuss-causes like Angst, Aggravation, Anger.  They don't parrot that stuff, they just parrot the zingy, spicy words that are heard rather frequently nowadays here and there in real life and in reel life as well.  At the movies. And so with the movie-rating domino being PG a couple days ago - we were good to go and so we went.

There was an unrelenting cold wind blowing all over the place that day.  It was sharp and rude feeling against my face and Steve's face too so we hunkered into our coats and hurried across the parking lot to the theater entrance.   The sharpness and rudeness of the outside world completely vanished, not even a dim memory of it, during the entire two hours of the PG movie.  The movie, the fairy tale story, absolutely swept me in and swept me away in a comfortable, cozy, warm familiar way.  The story itself is very familiar to me, to most everyone I'm pretty sure.  I've known the characters, the plot, the ending, all of it practically my entire 57 years.  Yet, it swept me in and swept me away.  As for Steve, he was in a linguistic safe haven - not a single zingy, spicy word throughout the entire two hours.  All the dominoes had fallen just right.  And it was none other than Disney's recent version of the old Cinderella fairy tale story that managed to sweep the two of us into that magically, cozily familiar haven. 



I can't and I won't analyze it, critique it, or cynically scoff at it as I suppose I should seeing as how I'm 57 years old and all.  But I just can't and I just won't.  And I won't give you a world-weary, sophisticated opinion about it either the reason being my 57ness melted clean away regarding this beautiful fairy tale movie.  I admit it; I'm not sophisticated and I'm not world-weary either.  It's because I haven't grown up yet.




"...have courage and be kind.  It'll help see you through the trials that life can offer." (Ella's mother)