Growing Down

Took a three day weekend there, but I'm back. The no weekend thing is proving difficult. It's hard to start up again after even two days off. Although it's really nice having the days off when I'm in it. I reserve the right to change my mind if the transition back in proves too difficult. I'm also, it must be said, in a funny place right now: so much on my mind, so hard to sift through it all and know what to write about.

I do keep thinking about something Lily said as we were walking up the street a few days ago. She was asking me about people's birthdays, when was so-and-so's birthday, how did I remember everybody's birthdays, and on and on. Finally, she couldn't think of any more names to ask, and we just walked in silence for a few moments, hugging ourselves in the cold. Then, she said, a bit dejected, "Grownups know so much. I'll never know as much as a grownup."

I'll admit; I was taken aback. Lately I've been feeling as though what I know would fit on the head of a pin. "Like what?" I asked, without stopping to think. I was genuinely curious.

"Like when everybody's birthday is," she answered.

I started thinking about how daunting it must seem to her that so often when she asks me a question, I do know the answer, or can fudge one on the spot. I know when all of my family member's birthdays are, and I know how to crack eggs without getting the shell in the bowl, and I know how to make music play from my computer, and I know how to write in cursive. I know how to give a pill to a dog, and how to drive stick shift, and how to sew a button back on her shirt. When I have to tell Lily, in fact, that I DON'T know something, she always seems surprised, come to think of it, a reaction that is not shared by certain others in my life, who have, on occasion, accused me of being a know-it-all.

But from where I'm sitting, it so often seems as though I know less and less. Working with teenagers underscores this; although they don't know how to talk to each other, or when somebody likes them, or how to choose the most flattering shirt, they know so much. Have any of you looked at an SAT in the last couple of decades? If you want to feel like an idiot, check out a practice book in a bookstore someday and see how much you once knew that you will never know again. Think about how many entire fields of knowledge--algebra, that Robert Frost poem you had to memorize, chemistry, Latin, playing the cello--have gone by the wayside, left so far behind you can't even remember the very first line of "Fire and Ice." Which, if I remember correctly, is about five lines long altogether.

Now of course this is not the kind of knowing I am saying I feel so bad at lately. I actually have no problem telling a fifteen-year-old who asks me if he will ever need to know sine, cosine and tangent again in his life that the answer is unequivocally no. Unless it kicks in past forty, I suppose. But somehow, I don't think so. No, the kind of knowing I feel so inept at these days is more the art of living kind of knowing, the kind of knowing, come to think of it, at which Lily excels. 

So what I should have said, when she worried out loud that she would never know as much as a grownup, is this: No, sweetheart, You know oh so much more. Just don't forget it as you grow up, and you'll be fine. Now, tell me how I can remember?