P.A.D.D.

I walk four or five times a week in Yorba Regional Park, one of the gems of the Orange County Regional Park System.   It is one of the places I will miss most when we move to Utah late this year.   During the week, the park is sparsely populated so I get to pay attention mostly to the natural beauty of the place, the lakes and the greenery and the assorted fauna that call it home.  There are ducks and squirrels and geese, hawks and osprey, herons and terns circling above the lakes.   Yes, and the small cadre of mostly older humans who inhabit the park on weekdays.   On weekends, particularly once spring has arrived, the park is crowded with picnickers and partiers, some of them large family reunions and my walking pastime becomes people watching.  I will admit that my sometimes curmudgeonly nature makes people watching more of a mixed bag (as we used to say).  I can find myself smiling at the joys a huge family has in being together or grumping at the behavior of certain individuals, whether it be someone playing music so loud it can be heard in Santa Ana, a bunch of adolescents annoying the ducks, or people leaving trash around.   In my heart of hearts, I know that the music hurts no one, the ducks will be fine and the park staff will be by to clean up the mess.

Now and Then

Let me tell you how it used to be… used to be meaning perhaps the first forty years of my life.  Generational roles were well defined.   It was the job of the kids to play and have fun.  We were good at it.   We played at being cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, baseball players and spacemen.  We played at being adults when we played but we didn’t want to be adults.   You’ve read Peter Pan haven’t you?   I won’t grow up, I don’t want to go to school and learn to be a parrot and recite a silly rule.   When we got in trouble, it wasn’t rebellion, just that something that seemed like fun ran afoul of our parents rules.  At around twelve, we were reassigned as adolescents.   Suddenly, breaking our parents rules … and of those of society … were part of the plan.  We discovered that many of those things our parents had warned us against felt good and if we were careful, we could avoid getting caught.  Not getting caught became part the fun.  We still didn’t want to be grown-ups, grown-ups were square, uncool, so out-of-it.   We dressed differently and we developed a language of our own.  We used words like %$&* and &%@$ but we didn’t dare do it in front of our parents.  So, today is Top Sites Tuesday #234 and my Two Thoughts on Tuesday concern how things have changed between Now and Then.