Middle-aged Babies
Have you ever met one of those adults you just can't picture having ever been young? And it's not like you can picture them old, either. They just seem preternaturally middle-aged. Those people. You know who I mean. Them.
I had one of those friends when I was a kid growing up in the Sault. Which is weird because I was pretty much always a kid and still am. People are always surprised by my age and it's not because I'm particularly young-looking - it's because I'm kid-like.
Some kids are middle-aged, some adults are kid-like.
Anyway, this friend was fully developed by age nine, started smoking king-sized menthols at age ten (that was back in the days when parents would send their kids to the corner store for smokes) read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at age eleven and declared God dead at age twelve.
And when she declared God dead, she did it by way of writing "Fuck Off" in the Bible during Sunday School. I worried about the Karma of that act for years. When my Mother told me she had found out via her mother that my friend had multiple sclerosis...
In any case, by age thirteen, of course, not only did my friend have a boyfriend - she was having sex. Regular sex. Like middle-aged married people have sex. Her boyfriend was sixteen (he turned out to be gay - but that's a whole other entry) and they used to "hook up" at his place in his bedroom which was down the basement in his parents' bungalow. She used the rhythm method and he used condoms and she never got pregnant or venereal disease or anything. They went out for a couple of years, broke up, she got a part-time job in a fast (in those days) food restaurant, and got a new boyfriend - a part-time dishwasher.
These days, I suppose everybody and their uncle would be up in arms about her behaviour but I'd don't know how they'd reconcile being up in arms with the fact that her first purchase after getting her part-time job at the fast (okay... it was A&W) food restaurant was - a parka. Yup. She bought a parka. Why? Because she needed a warm coat to walk to work in since she was too young to drive and her parents had seven other kids to not drive around to their part-time jobs or swimming lessons or whatever else. And she wanted something with fur trim around the hood because she liked that look. Timeless, she said. So she bought a wool, knee-length powder blue parka with white fur trim around the hood and polar bear decals stitched around the bottom.
By way of contrast, after my first year of university I headed out west to look for a job and my first purchase after getting off the train in Banff, Alberta - where I'd sat for a couple of days having had neither food nor drink because I didn't know how to cash traveller's cheques - after randomly running into my friend Judy who had a couple of bucks cash on her - was a Fudgesicle. In later years, I've tried to settle an upset stomach with Vodka Sodas. Today I used medication that expired in 2002... You get the picture.
So, my point really is - in this sibling society that is paradoxically one of obsessive watchfulness over children, would my friend even be allowed to be who she was? Or would she be thrown into some kind of treatment program for children born into middle age...
Maybe I should ask Dr. Phil...
