Some nights I don't feel much like going out. The kids and I, we'll take a night in. I have them grab me a couple of cold ones. I taught them how to crack them open by twisting the cap of the unopened bottles on their tiny arms. (If only my own mother had taken the time to instill a little skill in my life.) My father on the other hand used to have me perform mathematical parlor tricks. And he'd show off my feats for his mathematician friends. "Why does 2 x 4 = 4 x 2?" He'd cue me. "Because multiplication is communicative," I'd reply. His friend would laugh and say whatever the verbal equivalent of patting my head might be. At four years old, I had a finger on the adult pulse.
I think I must have been born with an old soul. The thrill of maturity reached its peak by the time I could read myself to sleep. Just one more responsibility heaped atop the ever-claustrophobic tightening of old age. Even now the creak in my bones whispers the despair of once viable octogenarians.
Rising, rising, rising until there is no turning back. One path, upon whose floor you took your first step so many uninformed decades ago. The same path upon which your informed form is bound to toil. But the climax is what makes your story worth telling. The eventual plateau and decent, they come with the territory.
Thus is the plight of the child actor. So many underage stars acting out the tortured life of a child commodity. The thrill of making it to the top drowned by the vertigo of their perilous positioning. The premature mid-life crisis–not understood by their fame-less counterparts.
If only we were adventurous buffalo roaming outside the borders of our Yellowstone designation. Then we'd be shot before we realized what we could be missing.
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