Now We're the Old People

During my teenage years, I found it endlessly fascinating to break social norms. You know, do strange things around strangers just to see their reactions. I spent a half hour riding up and down the elevator at ZCMI with various old people while doing things like singing, banging my head against the wall, or acting like I had never been in an elevator before and was hyperventilating with fear. I dressed like a spy and walked around the mall talking into my wrist watch. I would stage dramatic street fights on corners at night and then laugh and run away if any cars slowed to help.

Yes I was a strange child. Yes I'm more nervous in front of people I know than people I don't know. And yes, I was taking A.P. Psychology at the time and some of those strange antics were actually observation assignments. Isn't psychology great?

Fast forward 12 years and we get a knock on our door one Saturday evening. Dan opens it and sees a kid who looks like his face was chewed off by a pit bull. He's talking in a british accent about the weather.

Dan says, "Are you okay? What happened to your face?"
British boy says, "Took a nasty spill on the playground. Wood chips, ya know?"
Dan says, "Should I call the paramedics?"
British boy, "Oh no. I believe a stroll in the air will do me some good."
And then the boy skips away. When's the last time you saw a 13 year old boy skip?

I worried about that kid all night thinking, "Should we have let that poor boy skip away? What if he had a concussion? amnesia?" But the next day at church I found out from the other kids that Logan (recently recovered from a bike wreck) had just been hanging out in the neighborhood and loved to do random things like knocking on people's doors and talking about the weather in any variety of accents.

And then I realized that now I'm not the goofy kid, I'm the old person that goofy kids pull pranks on. Being the old person isn't nearly as fun.