Brettia

Don’t worry, my parents paid the electrical bill. On Saturday, I turned on the light in the office (where the computer is in my house), and it shorted out or something. Now I have to rely on a tiny desk lamp for light to type by. Pitiful, really, but I’ll get over it. The light shorting out reminded me of a time long ago, back when I lived in Missouri (where I was born). Here’s the story:
My first real friend when I started school was named Randall. We didn’t really meet, or “bond,” or anything like that. We just happened to be standing next to each other one day at recess in kindergarten, and he asked, “You want to be friends?”
What was I supposed to say? “Yes,” I replied.

And that was it. We were friends for that entire school year, and we were together pretty much all the time. But in first grade, he wasn’t in my class, so I found someone new, a somewhat-dorky class-clown named Chris. We sat together in class, we went to each other’s houses, we had sleepovers, we did everything that first graders do together. And one day, we were in Chris’s basement/playroom, which was stuffed to the ceiling with toys and junk, when we had the bright idea of hanging one of those white, battery-operated lights (the kind where you press it and it turns on) from an old light fixture that had no light or fan on it, just bare, rusty copper wires (he had an old house). So I, being the taller of us two, was elected to do the job, and after we had wrapped the light in that weird string that you find on balloons (flat, ribbony), I tied it to one of the copper wires.

We stepped back to admire our handiwork, and I accidentally backed into the light switch that controlled the fixture, turning it on. The thick copper wires (more like bars, really) glowed white for a moment, and than a shower of sparks came from the fixture, scattering about the room. Chris just stared, while I had the presence of mind to turn off the switch. We stamped out the areas where the sparks were singing the rug and took down the little light. Then we pretended that the whole thing had never happened, and we went out back to jump on Chris’s trampoline.

And there you have it, another interesting tale from Brett’s childhood, which, I suppose, is now over. Though I wonder, didn’t childhood last from age 0 to 17 once? Why is it that now kids feel like they’re “grown up” by age 12 or 13? My hypothesis is that it’s because their parents let them. Not so long ago, kids didn’t have hours of free time; they had to work on farms or in factories or at the family business. This also meant they didn’t have time to get with “the wrong people” and be corrupted as early as kids nowadays. So children might have been anywhere from 16-18 before they knew everything about everything and had experimented with drugs and each other and so on and so forth.
By claiming that my childhood is over, I don’t mean to say that I know everything about everything, or that I’ve done drugs or had sex, nor do I believe that the acts of doing drugs or having sex are coming of age rituals. My childhood is over because society says it is. People have come to expect that kids ages 12-17 (and older, at times) should be moody, withdrawn, sex-crazed, disrespectful, and should dress like either prostitutes or gangsters. Wasn’t there ever a time when kids were just kids? When boys wore jeans and T-shirts and girls wore dresses or T-shirts and shorts or whatever? When rich kids didn’t look as if they’d just broken out of jail?

Is it possible for me to reminisce about a time that I never lived in? Am I completely wrong? Maybe drugs and sex and disrespect and violence have always been just they way kids were. But I hope not, because I’m already ashamed to be a part of my generation; I don’t want to be ashamed to be a human too.