Carry Your Childhood With You

“If you carry your childhood with you, you never become old.”

---Tom Stoppard

People say that “old” is a relative term. I’m not sure about that. Just this morning, I was rooting through my fridge to get some leftovers to bring for lunch. A couple of days ago, there was a nice chicken leg in a covered dish, with some garlic broccoli rabe, and it would make an excellent lunch, right? Not so much. When I took the cover off, all that remained was a fossilized piece of congealed meat with something that looked like it might have once been a vegetable. Or a lab experiment. Clearly, I need to start putting labels on the leftovers, because there was no doubt that this food was old. Super old, like give-you-food-poisoning old. It’s a good thing that people don’t age the way leftovers do, cold and alone, slowly becoming unrecognizable. Wait...omg...that actually happens sometimes. OK, I'll work on that next

 I’m 55 as of last week. Somehow between running around in my yard as a kid, skipping through high school summers on my beach, going to college, getting a job, and having kids of my own, more than half a century has passed. Does that mean I’m old? Who knows? I remember a woman I worked for in my first “grown-up” job. I was an investigator for the Department of Labor, working on cases of racketeering, embezzlement, fraud. At one point, I was the youngest person in my job in the country. Joan, who became a dear friend and mentor, celebrated her “speed limit” birthday one year at an office lunch party. I remember thinking how amazing she was. Her career was legendary among the rest of us new agents; there wasn’t anything she either didn’t know or couldn’t find out. Now I’m the same age Joan was then, but why do I still feel like a kid? Maybe it’s immaturity, and I just need to grow up?

Nah. It’s not that. Joan used to say all the time that it’s not the number of years you’ve been around; it’s what you do with them. One thing that hasn’t happened for me is giving up certain pieces of my childhood. Who would do that? On my bed sits a very worn-out stuffed dog. His name is Quincy because I got him at a toy store in Quincy Market when I was ten. I don’t go to sleep without him. Quincy was standing by when I had my kids, when I had my hip replaced, and when I had cancer. He’s been through it all with me. Talk about looking your age? That poor pup is showing his age. An overzealous pug got at him once, and I had to stitch him back up. The pug was banished to her crate, and Quincy recovered. He no longer has eyes, and his fur isn’t white anymore, it’s a faded dingy dishwater color, but he’s still here.

Maybe it’s silly to be so attached to a piece of cloth, but I don’t care, and it’s not just me. Asking around among my friends, it turns out that many of them have a “woobie.” Seriously, almost everyone has something stashed away from childhood. A favorite blanket, a stuffed animal, a doll, or that last Matchbox car they can’t throw away. Considering how crazy our world is getting, is it so wrong to hold on to something meaningful from a time when our biggest worry was getting the good swing at recess?

There are days when it’s so tempting to tuck Quincy under my arm and bring him everywhere. I can’t be the only one who could use a little furry friend during a stressful meeting or a challenging day, right? When I see toddlers in the supermarket, wearing footy pajamas and carrying a teddy bear, I am downright envious. I want to high five them and say, “You are living your best life, you go!” Jammies and Quincy might not go over well at a staff meeting or an interview, though, and people probably would stare at me and think, “She’s off her head for sure, she’s carrying around a stuffed dog.” Also, I have a terrible habit of losing things, so if Quincy ever got misplaced or, God forbid, left behind, I’d be devastated.

We should never have to put away anything that brings back good memories and provides comfort. Yes, I’m 55, and I have a stuffed animal I can’t sleep without, so what? You can have my Quincy dog when you pry it from my cold, dead hand. Until then, he’s with me.

Quiet and Humble? Not so much....

"The older you get, the quieter you become. Life humbles you so deeply as you age. You realize how much nonsense you've wasted time on."

---Author Unknown

It's a pretty safe bet that at no time during my life if I live to be 150, will the words "humble" or "quiet" be accurate descriptors of me. It's a good thing we get quieter as we age because I remember being five years old and in trouble (again) at school for yapping too much and being bossy. No one was surprised, since a church preschool that claimed to welcome "All of God's Children" sent me packing after three days. The official reason was, "She's just not ready for this environment." The real reason? Gross insubordination.  When it was lunch time, I wanted to color. Recess found me wanting to stay on my mat and nap, because of course, I had spent naptime, arguing over crayons. At snack time, the rebellion was complete when I told Miss Mabel, "I don't like graham crackers, what else you got?" Nobody was amused, least of all my mum, who would have sent me to a workhouse if it meant she got a couple of hours without me.

So yes, it's a good that as we age, we mellow out a little. The nonsense, however, takes a bit longer to go away, honestly. It's more accurate to say that we likely put up with different nonsense as we age than we might have in our younger days. In my first job out of college, in federal law enforcement, the required wardrobe was business suits with big shoulders and crisp blouses. Every Sunday afternoon I set about ironing those starched dress shirts, making sure there was a run-free selection of pantyhose for the week and lint-brushing my tailored suits. I was a suit junkie. I would haunt Filene's clearance racks, Talbot's Annual sale and of course, the Holy Grail,  Lord, and Taylor to score my power suits. The Dior couture wool suit I scored at a Filene's Basement super clearance goes down as my favorite shopping trophy.

Fast forward a few years, and instead of wrangling racketeering investigations and federal labor laws and I'm a stay-at-home mom, and it's considered a dress-up day if  I wear khakis and a T-shirt with no holes or stains. At that point, the nonsense of power suits and endless ironing was gone. Replaced with the nonsense of toddler fashion, preschool pressure, parenting angst, and sandbox social climbing. Friends of mine that were still in the workforce considered my world one of nonsense, what with all the drool and dirty diapers, but honestly, after having kids? Ironing was a long ago habit, never to return.

The days of having little kids have passed in my house, but last year's nonsense could be this year's super important matter. Now it's teen issues, attitude, an entirely different career, and some other issues best not gone into that, all together, have me as far from quiet or humble as I've been since hitting the bricks at the Village Church Preschool in Nahant. I'm getting older, which is excellent, considering the alternative, but come on. Where is my mellow? On television you see these incredibly hip-looking retired people buying a vineyard or painting in an artist's colony, and while retirement isn't happening anytime soon for me, it seems like the quiet and humble part of my life has also been delayed.

While it's nice to have moved on from some people, places, and attitudes that are well left in the Wayback Machine, it hasn't always been moving forward for me. There were definitely times where everything was just going in one big circle, and then there were setbacks too when passing "Go" was just not happening. I think it's rather more about lots of stumbling around, with the hopeful goal of being relatively happy and healthy along the way. We age in a straight line, younger to older, but that isn't how the rest of the world always works. There will be times for silence and humility, but I bet that the minute we think we have it figured out, something else will crop up.