John Lithgow has a great song called "Big Kids Scare the Heck Out of Me". This was certainly true for me:
big kids were always hanging around behind the
7-11,
smoking, or worse, drinking
beer at the playground and
flipping the swings over the swingset. This made it impossible to use the swings the next day. I wondered if I would ever be scary like that.
But even more mysterious was the world of grownups. They seemed to have an infinite amount of cool stuff. As I got older and became a scary, clove-cigarette-smoking, beer swilling, swing-flipping teenager, I wondered when I would finally feel like a real grownup.
Would it be when I had my own keys on a keyring? A wallet with money in it? When I left home and lived on my own? When I had credit cards? A car? As I achieved each real grownup milestone, I felt a secret thrill of adrenalin, like a spy sneaking through another layer of security into some heavily guarded military base.
Am I there yet? I have a baby, and all the above possessions and encumberments. Yet I still feel like a spy, an imposter. Probably because I don't have those baby teeth strung on a necklace yet.
It does add strangely to my enjoyment of life that I get all happy doing something as simple as getting in my truck and driving to the grocery store. It feels like I am getting away with something that I should not really be allowed to do.