Oh Great Deep Thought

Earlier this week my family doctor of 20+ years died of a heart attack, and today I attended his funeral. My dad, as a friend of Dr. Marsh and a pastor, was asked to officiate and during his eulogy he talked about my grandmother and her obsession with photos and home videos of her four granddaughters as small children and how, though she was usually behind the camera instead of infront of it, you can hear her voice.

Tangent: I just realized that I tend to write extremely long sentences.

Once I got home with two pints of the best ice cream ever in my hands (Tom's Ice Cream Bowl, a sleazy little diner in Zanesville with the best homemade ice cream you've ever had) I chose one of the many videos taken by my grandmother back in the late 80s and early 90s and proceeded to watch my three year old self during a 1989 summer trip to Connecticut.

There's one part of the video where we're in the car and I'm the only grandchild in the back of my grandparent's enormous blue suburban craning my neck to see out the windows because up ahead of us is my uncle leading us to the beach with his boat hitched to the back of his car. Nanny asked if I could see the boat, the lens of the camcorder zoomed in on that little girl in the backseat, and I cried out "I see the boat!!! I saw the boat again!!!!" jubilantly and with the biggest open-mouthed grin ever seen. Pure joy shining out of my three-year-old face at the prospect of riding in a boat, something I had never before done having grown up in the landlocked Ohio Valley.

Moments later the scene changes and you watch my two older sisters and my 28 year old parents climbing into the boat with my aunt and uncle. In the background you hear the sobs of a broken three year old heart because she was not joining her sisters in the boat ride she had dreamed of just minutes before.

I remembered back to this video as I sat here in my freezing room processing claims and planning a wedding in my head and via text with my fiance as NCIS dvds play in the background. As I pressed the a button to skip over the opening credits it dawned on me just how much my life has changed since I was that little three year old girl. Back then, nothing made me happier than tripping after my sisters, trying my darndest to keep up, and seeing a boat up close and personal just made my world. We didn't have computers or cell phones or DVD players or HD television or even real cable. Instead I sprawled on the floor with my grandfather and taught him to play Candyland while my baby sister strained to see over the edges of her playpen. My seven-year-old sister had learned to crochet. The three eldest of us and my two cousins were entertained for hours by a monkey that would convulse when it heard applause. We played tiddly-winks. Life was so much simpler back in 1989.

And now here I am, typing on a computer with my Blackberry dinging with emails and texts on the desk in front of me, my tv on my dresser across the room playing DVDs, my playstation on the floor waiting for me to finally finish my game. I am almost the age my parents were in that video from 1989. They already had four children, drove a beat up olive green oldsmobile, were dirt poor due to Dad's school loans... and soon I'll be in the same boat (minus the children).

I remember being a kid and dreaming of what I'd be like when I was older, and now that I'm older I don't FEEL older until I watch those videos and remember the pure simple joy of being a kid and being alive. I often say I wish I knew then what I know now, but that's a complete and total lie. If I knew then what I know now, the weight of the world would be on my shoulders and I wouldn't be a kid at all, and I would never have known joy. That three year old knew who she was. She knew what made her happy. She had parents who loved her, who had full lives ahead of them. She had three sisters she loved being around. She was free.

Sometimes I really think it's a shame we have to grow up. To deal with life. To watch your mom fight a losing battle with cancer. To move away and stress about bills and finding a home and creating a life away from the comfort of the place you grew up. To feel like your life isn't being lived as much as it is endured. We so often just try to make it from one day to the next without realizing what we're missing until reality smacks us in the face. I, for one, don't want to wake up one day and realize I'm eighty-nine years old and my life has meant nothing.

So I won't.