One Night

When I was very young, too small to reach the cookie jar without dragging a kitchen chair to the counter's edge, too quiet to be seen eavesdropping on grown up conversations I shouldn't have understood, I knew things.

I knew that life was hard, and that love could be expensive. I knew that being smart could buy you trouble, and behaving badly could borrow you attention. I knew that people marched to their own drummer's beats, and that it didn't matter if I couldn't hear them, or feel them; I knew it wasn't very likely that I would ever follow, even if I could.

When I was very young, too inarticulate to tell you all about it, but far too wise not to comprehend, I knew things.

Now I am older and I feel as if I am in the dark trying to figure out what I do know. I still eavesdrop on conversations (some people never grow up) but now I understand what I don't want to hear. Now I know life is hard and love has been very expensive and that being smart now days doesn't buy much. I know the cost of what behaving badly can bring. And that my drummer beat was slow and silent whereas I lagged behind and couldn't fit in.

Somehow being young was so much better because learning lifes lessons is a school I had hoped to not attend.

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
~ Erma Bombeck