When you're young.

When you're young, it seems life is all about getting things. You get older, more hair, bigger. You get stuff. Clothes, shoes. If you're lucky some jeans, a couple flannel shirts, some t-shirts, a good pair of hiking boots. Cargo shorts, a boonie hat, some flip-flops. 

You get some stuff you don't like though thought you would--underwear that turns out too tight. Shoes that fit great in the store then magically crush your feet two hundred yards out the door. 

When you're real young you get a bike, maybe a skateboard, skis, snowboard. A fishing pole, ooh, that's a good one. With that you can not only have a lot of fun but can feed yourself once you get it figured out. A lot of stuff like that is good too because you get to know your Dad or Mom or uncle, aunt, brother, sister when they teach you how to work it. 

Maybe you'll get a car. I hope so. I got one even before I had a license to drive it. It was a '59 Studebaker Lark 7. Ok, well actually it was a Lark 8 but that #4 cylinder never did fire so I called it the Lark 7. It was baby-shit yellow with a gas-chamber green trunk lid. I loved it.

It had an automatic transmission but rather than shifting PRNDL, it was PNDLR. So when you were at the light with your buddy in the '51 Plymouth business coupe next to you and you put it in neutral revved it up and yanked it into gear when the light changed, half the time you skip right through low into reverse and lose the race by hauling ass backwards. Sure did smoke the tires good when that happened. But you still lost. 
That gave you something else, losing that race. Experience. You learned that you had to pay attention to how you did things or they could go terribly wrong. You learned that even though you looked really cool, you were going the wrong way. You learned that tires are expensive. Experience.

So you're young for a while and over time you get lots of stuff. You learn how to do things. How to act with people. How to have a really good time and how to deal with having a bad time. You learn how to love someone. If you're like me, the person you learn to love the most will be someone you didn't expect. And that will be grand.

Wow. It all seems so long ago. But it still feels good to smile about it.