Whenever I hear one of my contemporaries waxing nostalgic about childhood, I have to suppress a snort. It’s not that I had an unhappy childhood by any means; I grew up with a loving family in a safe neighborhood, I liked school okay (read: didn’t get stuffed into any lockers), and if I whined pointedly enough, my parents usually came through with the red Le Sportsac or the pierced ears for my birthday. I just don’t want to go back there, even though I wouldn’t have to pay taxes, and come to think of it, I’d probably still enjoy launching my Barbies over the roof with the special slingshot Agent Weiss and I cobbled together out of two hundred rubber bands and a barbecue spatula, and God knows I’ve never understood why grown-up girls don’t still have sleepovers with lots of make-up and ice cream sundaes and a whole stack of Val Kilmer movies…I mean, that’s still fun, right? We stopped doing it because we had dates to go on, but if nobody’s got a date and it’s cold and rainy out and we want to experiment with liquid eyeliner while watching the Top Gun volleyball scene for the eightieth time, why should we have to do that on our own? Yeah, yeah, one of you got married — bring the guy! We’ll give him a pedicure! We’ve got enough booze and snacks — pack him a bag and get over here!

Okay, okay, so I do miss stuff about childhood. I’ve written before about the cool stuff you can do as adults that our parents told us all not to do, and I’ve also written about all the weird rules and regulations that come with kid-dom, which most of us block out of our minds once we’ve arrived in junior high. (It’s still my contention that “no givesies/no backsies” has its place in corporate America. Why these Fortune 500 companies don’t hire me as a consultant instead of Faith Popcorn, I don’t understand.) But what about the stuff that we just…stopped doing? I mean, we had to stop doing a lot of that stuff, because at age ten, it’s kind of cute in a pathetic sepia-toned way that you have a picture of Shaun Cassidy in your locker that you razored out of Tiger Beat, and that you kiss it between every class when you drop off your books. But you can’t do that at a law firm. (Not until you make partner, anyway. Then you can force everyone else to kiss the Shaun Cassidy picture too.) And blowing spitwads on the bus is fun. Obnoxious and disgusting, but fun. You do that on a cross-town bus to Penn Station, you get thrown through the front windshield. It’s a fine line between “in touch with your inner child” and “deranged,” and it’s important to know where that line is located.

It’s also important to distinguish between “childlike” and “childish.” Let’s face it: the silent treatment doesn’t actually accomplish anything. It never has. But every year at about this time, I find myself in the middle of the floor, surrounded by W-2s and 1099s and receipts and spreadsheets and check stubs, the shape of my calculator’s minus key imprinted into my right index finger, the cats sacked out on the “entertainment deductions” pile, and I stare into the middle distance with my eyeballs visibly throbbing and wonder what ever happened to that book my mom got us, entitled something like Fifty Bazillion Vaguely Stupid Things To Do With Construction Paper When It’s Rained For A Week Straight During Summer Vacation And Your Kids Have One Foot In Jack Torrance Territory, because I’d way rather hang out on the floor and build a working replica of a spinach processing factory out of dry cleaner shirt cardboard and sparkles than try to figure out how much money I owe the government. But I could do that, and I don’t know why I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t do fun art stuff anymore. I mean, I do know; it’s because I “don’t have time.” I should make time, though. I own watercolors and crayons. I can’t draw at all; even my stick figures look like Dorf as rendered by Picasso while drunk on an absinthe-and-paint-thinner mimosa. But I could always buy a coloring book. In fifth grade, we had “reading period” once a week, and our teacher — a huffy, snappy woman who seemed actively to dislike children in general, and all of us as individuals, most of the time — would read aloud from books like A Separate Peace and Flowers For Algernon every Friday afternoon while we all lay on the floor, or colored, or caught up on homework. Whether I chose to spend the period drawing abstract patterns, watching Red do the Bob Ross thing with Craypas, or just listening to Mrs. C take us through the story (she didn’t cover the teaching profession in laurels, but she had a lovely speaking voice), I always liked Fridays. It felt like a salon or something. I should set aside an hour a week to lie on the floor and color and listen to NPR.

Or read. God, I miss reading, reading just for the sake of reading. I still read every day, but compared to the sheer volume I used to read? Pffft. Sure, I used to have more time, but I crammed the reading in even when I didn’t. I’d get up in the morning, pour myself a bowl of cereal, and read at the table, and then I’d get dressed and pack my bookbag and wander down the driveway with my nose still in the book to wait for carpool. I’d read more during the ride to school. I’d read in homeroom. During boring classes, I’d hold the book in my lap and read on the sly instead of listening to Mrs. Lubowe explain the difference between shale and schist. I read on car trips. I read late at night. I read all weekend. On summer vacations, when little annoyances like homework and feigning attention in class didn’t occupy my time, I read at least five books a week. My parents must have come up the stairs to go to bed and found me reading in the weak triangle of light from the hall a thousand times, disobeying them to finish “just one more chapter,” ruining my eyes. Or in the closet with a flashlight. Or in the bathroom, “getting up for a glass of water” with a book in my arm and no glass in sight. Or on the stairs, where I’d just dropped down where I stood when I got to an engrossing passage. Or stuffing my brain with one last sentence before I had to close the book and sit down for dinner with the family. Yesterday, I took most of the day off from work and chores and stuff and read an entire book, and it got later and later and later and I couldn’t stop reading it even though I had to get up early this morning to go to the bank, and I finished the book and immediately started to miss it, if that makes any sense — to miss the characters I’d come to know, to wonder about the plot and whether I’d overlooked anything in the set-up. And I also missed the days when I used to stay up half the night scaring myself to death with Stephen King, falling asleep with all the lights in my room on, sitting bolt upright when a suspicious creak woke me hours later to see that the sky had gotten light and one of the cats had come in to snooze on my feet, and repeating the whole cycle the next day, reading in a hammock, reading on the porch, reading in the basement where it didn’t get so hot and sticky, because I didn’t have anything else to do and couldn’t have thought of a single thing I’d rather do anyway. These days, the reading gets jammed in at bedtime or on the subway. I so seldom sprawl out on the bed with a bag of ginger snaps, a feline, and a giant hardcover that presses a big dimple into the mattress. I have to do that more often — have to drag myself away from whatever wretched late-night cop show is on TV and start working my way through the pile of unread books instead.

At least when I stay at my desk until all hours of the morning instead of reading, I can sit in weird positions, because I work at home. Sometimes I sit with my legs tucked under me, or kneeling in my desk chair, in a way I never could at an office job. Remember how Tom Hanks sat in his chair in data processing when he first got the job at the toy company in Big? And how Jon Lovitz stared at him all “sit like a normal person, freak show”? Adults sit on their butts with their feet on the floor. Adults don’t sit cross-legged or loll around on the floor nearly as much as they should, in my opinion. Adults don’t lie on the floor in front of the TV on their stomachs, chins in their hands, kicking their feet up over their backs, watching an I Love Lucy rerun with their mouths literally hanging open. That’s a pity.

And grown-ups don’t haul a sleeping bag out into the backyard for the night, either, and lie on their backs staring at the stars and scare each other by pretending to see bats in the trees. Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we make a stack of cheese sandwiches and haul an air mattress up on the roof? Sure, it’s harder to manage when you live in an apartment, but it’s not impossible. That’s why God invented fire escapes. And if you have a yard, you have no excuse. Get a tarp and a sleeve of Oreos and get your butt outside. Bring your sweetheart. Bring your dog. Dogs love that shit. They get to feel important, like you need them to defend you. They get to growl. Come on — backyard campouts rule. I hate the outdoors, and I still like backyard campouts; I think it’s the proximity of the fridge. And the bathroom.

I guess we all just have to make time to do the fun stuff we did as kids that we can still get away with doing: reading, coloring, sleeping out all night (or at least it starts to rain or you run out of Ritz Bits). Every time I see Big — it’s on cable almost constantly, and I always watch it even though I’ve probably seen it a hundred times by now — I think about how much having a trampoline in my apartment would kick ass. When I imagine putting one of the cats on it, and then jumping on it myself and watching the cat sail about ten feet in the air, tail angrily fattening in flight, I feel horribly guilty, and I’d never do it because I couldn’t control the trajectory of the feline and it would probably hurt the cat, but I start giggling anyway. I think about how I haven’t seen an honest-to-God food fight in way too long. Man, I used to love food fights. It starts out small, with a Goldfish cracker or something, and the next thing you know huge blobs of mashed potato are winging through the air and splopping in people’s hair. Even the stealthy flicking of a pea at one’s sibling across the table is highly rewarding. Except that I still do that. And I still get in napkin ring wars with Mr. Stupidhead. And give people bunny ears in photos. And jump on my bed from time to time. And own a water pistol.

All right, all right. I just don’t want to pay my taxes. That’s the real issue here. Okay, then. Move along. Nothing to see here.

February 25, 2002

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