Today I was a bad boy. I didn't do anything remotely kid-like. Unless you call barely staying awake at your new job kid-like. I didn't even get a few moments to take the guitar out and strum a few chords. And I should. Last week I learned Highway to Hell by AC/DC and you can't NOT play that when you know it. Even people who don't know what a guitar is want to play Highway to Hell.
I did plan on going for a walk with the girls – they wanted to revisit their bridge overpass again. I just want to break a new trail, go in a different direction. Quite frankly, I have been thinking about that concept a lot lately.
Supporting Evidence #1: This weekend. A traffic filled trip to the cabin. If I went along all my former paths, I knew they would only lead to traffic, chaos, anger and frustration. So I chose the unknown path. You see, I think our human instincts detect the unknown and immediately develop solutions using the known to get around it. Maybe it's fear of change. Or just plain fear. So if the known course only leads to frustration and the unknown course leads to fear, what do you have to lose? I took the unknown course and the experience was not fear or frustration – it was excellent.
Supporting Evidence #2: Okay. I don't really have anything for #2. Though, I will say I am almost finished with Cathy Day's Circus in Winter and on the bus this afternoon I was reading the chapter on the death of Ollie Hofstader and I had one of those death moments. You know those moments in time where you glimpse your own mortality and for a few brief seconds you succumb to such a sense of dread you have to shake yourself out of it. I had one of those. And amidst all this joblessness, financial turmoil and the face of the unknown, I had to remind myself all that is nothing compared to the grand exit, the final bow. So why not break a new trail, do the opposite or take a chance. It's very liberating.
Wait...
I remember something kid-like. It wasn't today but yesterday. The kids downloaded the first full-season of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.
Hey, Hey, Hey!
From the canned Hannah-Barbara laugh track to Cosby's many voices and the Junkyard Band, I again found myself transported back to my childhood.
Back then I never saw it as a black/white thing. It made me laugh and it had cool music and Dum-Dum with his hat pulled down over his face. And Bill Cosby was svelte back then. They were all groovy cats. What's not to like. When I watched it again, I had perspective. It amazed me how ground-breaking that show was for its time. In a way, I feel guilty for not admiring the barriers they were breaking at the time. But I'm still mystified with that magical age where things like race and cultural backgrounds have absolutely zero foothold in a young child's mind.
I'm thankful my mind never got past age eight, because Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids are just as cool today as they were back in the 70's.
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