Six people leaned heavy over the starting line. The brand new asphalt stretched one mile downhill, a perfect falling black band of hot. Six crazy people, two boys maybe twelve and thirteen years old, on mono-flex-rail skateboards (cheaters), one ex-mayor stuffed into an inner-tube sitting in a tiny plastic blow-up pool on a piece of plywood screwed to a furniture dolly, one BIG electric-line-man stuck in the wagon-bucket of a Radio-Flyer, red, one wife, mine, sitting in her five point office chair and me, cross legged, meditation style, in a garden cart, holding the long handle in front, outwards, to try and steer. Two real kids and four grown-up-pretend-kids, cluttered, crashed, squeaked, rolled and flew to the finish line, the First Annual Anything That Rolls-GoesContest at CastleRock Texas.
Aaron and his family made tacos and tamales. His daughter Rosa collected one dollar per two tacos. Aaron sang as he seared Manchaca over the open, gas burner, happy Concinero. Hina and her family made vegetarian Indian food, beaming at all the positive comments on her curry and garlic nan. Johnny and Rod down the street at Java Bean Java, made hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hotdogs and sweets. And everybody ate like kids, food stuffing big smiles.
Too dark to count but at least a hundred people sat on the rocks and the stone decks and in chairs perched along the edge of the office lawn. Two-hundred eyes danced with reflections of fireworks, exploding from the floating peninsula below. Every one of those two-hundred eyelids hid the eyes of a kid.
When Science is looked at through the microscope of a kid, a kaleidoscope of wonder and limitless potentiality erupts. The child has not yet learned to doubt. Wonder rules. Rules don't.
A kid isn't afraid to ask, "Why not"? A child isn't afraid to fail, unless the child has been taught to fear failure.
It requires a certain measure of "screw-it-I'm not going to worry about what people think" to get up and dance when you think you've got two left feet, to stand in front of a large group of people and speak when you think you've got nothing to say, to stay in a deal when everybody says to get out and to dive from a deal when everybody says to stay put, when you know, somehow know, deep down inside, the deal is sour.
Kids do this instinctively. They haven't yet learned to doubt themselves.
Sure, they might crash in a garden cart, an office chair, a red Radio Flyer wagon or a tiny plastic blow-up pool, they might look stupid as hell, gray-haired with more fat-cells than brain-cells but they'll laugh as they roll down the hill, they'll be kids for ninety seconds, young at heart, and those precious ninety seconds will tick on in memory until the day that they die.
Insightful inventors, salient scientists, mystical mathematicians and the genius, generally, look at the Universe through the Kaleidoscope of Wonder that is to be a kid.
One of my dearest friends is eighty years old. The other two are each, eighty two. They are the youngest, old people I know. They look young, act young, live young, stay young and they survive. ALIVE, because they more often ignore, how many years there bodies, carry. They look at life through the eyes of a child and they still wonder. Their lives are wonderful and wonder-filled.
And they are WISE.
They could cloud the skies and their eyes with too much experience but instead, they chose to exist in the moment of wonder as they did long ago, when younger. They still see clowns in the clouds.
Question everything. Turn every question upside down. Answer it backwards. Rearrange the words. Find clowns in the clouds. Grab both ends of the wire, "Why" and "Not" and shock the system with irreverent joy.
You can be un-taught the thoughts that hold you back. You can back the thoughts un-taught. Wake up your child of wonder!
Perhaps, ten persons out of the hundreds that read this will get it. If you are one of the ten who get it, tell me. We'll plan a little play-time and wonder.
