mystery, revisited

Though I am old, there are some who, seeing me, see a child.

Thoughts about childhood remind me of those days before any of us little kids got the concept of teenagerhood. It was right around the corner, yet acres and acres away.

As a group we bunched and separated, individually confident until the next round with gravity, with marred knees and bandaids and a mommy's kiss. We didn't know the coming knowledge that was just a surge around that corner. Sometimes, though, we acted it out. Playing daddies and mommies with soft blankets' bundles and cookies in an easy-bake oven. Weddings on the sidewalk, giggles and petals, nary a kiss-the-bride.

Those who stood in doorways watching us little kids could not explain the mystery to our satisfaction in terms of reality. They could answer questions with directness and ease (the best of them did), but they knew they couldn't make us understand, that side of puberty, what they knew on their side.

If little kid-ness had a longer shelf life, those in doorways might have been audience to more than shouted theories by my neighborhood's show-offs in tennies. What if tiny scholars amongst us had had time to write dissertations, teach seminars, build paradigms? Debates on where babies come from might have commenced every spring. Some groups of thought would have been dismissed, some laughed at, some heralded as most likely true.

And then, as truly happened, things would have changed. Differently for everyone, yet the same shift, while those in doorways watching in love would see our dawning understanding, our sheepish shrugs, the same as took place the generation before.

These days I wonder about those gazing at me from doorways I don't yet comprehend. Even if they could answer my questions, they couldn't make me understand what is evident, has been for a while, from their side. I trust some of them are waiting, soft chuckles in their throats, for things to change.