Ah, The Good Ol Days

These days the soundtrack that plays in my car is pretty consistent. It usually includes random shouts of the names of everything I pass on the highway, such as, “Bus!” or “Airpwane!” or “Pony!”

My son is at the age where he identifies everything he knows the word for, which, since he’s not quite two years old, is cute. And anyone within ear shot always smiles and heaps praise on him.

“That’s right, that is a tree!”

Before long, almost immediately after hearing the word ‘car’ 150 times on the way to the store, it dawned on me that no one else in my life does this. The habit seems to die out at a relatively young age, which is a shame if you think about it. If everyone continued this practice into adulthood, we’d overhear a lot of things like, “Hair plugs!” or “Boobies!”

Instead, on those occasions when an adult is overheard shouting out the names of everything he or she sees, they’re thought to be drunk or an escapee. Not cute.

The same goes for our eating habits.

While I was out of town last week, my wife told me that our son thoroughly enjoyed the mashed potatoes that he had for dinner. He then reached over to her plate and ate the potatoes she had left. When those were gone, he proceeded to climb on the table and dig into the potato bowl until his lust for potatoes was satisfied. Again, because of his age, everyone at the table laughed and made roughly the same comment, “He must really like mashed potatoes!”

Of course if I tried this at a dinner party, everyone would shudder like the unsuspecting guests in the old sketches with Mr. Peepers from Saturday Night Live.

People always wonder why adults don’t have as much fun and don’t laugh as much as we did when we were kids. And yet, if we try to recapture that innocence, society only looks down on us. When my son is, say, 14, I can’t think of a single place or time when it will be appropriate for me to ask him, “Do you have to go potty?”

I’d look weird, he’d look weird, everyone who claimed to know us would look weird.

And yet, these are the things that make life great – shouting out whatever you want to, eating in an uncivilized manner, and urinating without having to remove your pants. No wonder that growing out of these habits coincides with life becoming less fun.

Thank goodness Thanksgiving is coming up soon and homes all across the country will be filled with the kind of behavior described above, however short lived.