When you were young

Life has always been a sort of game to me. When I was young I always loved to play it. I loved playing before it mattered how many points you scored, what results came about from your performance, or before anyone decided how skilled you were. It was just a game.

When you start to get older, different things start to "matter". Your individual skill set, what makes you, you, becomes put to a test. A sort of benchmark to judge yourself against your peers. The game you were once naturally drawn to and loved becomes a sort of way for you to classify yourself. A way to fit in to the society you live in.

There are certain things that can make a man cry and they are different for every man. I could be standing in a line at a grocery story and observe a man and his wife exchange honest harmonious acts of affection and feel nothing. To me, that just isn't a powerful feeling. It's not to say that the act between the two of them isn't filled with less love, I just wouldn't describe it as a powerful feeling that maybe another man might.

I was at a basketball game earlier and I felt something. An innocent, energetic boy of about twelve won the attention of a cheerleader that was cheering for her team during a timeout at the game. During this timeout, all the cheerleaders were supposed to go and pass out pizzas to overly excited fans. This young boy was desperately seeking the attention of this one cheerleader. He finally got it, and the girl smiled candidly at him and brought him the pizza. I was 4 rows back. The boy didn't seem to care much about the pizza, in fact, I never saw him open it. His dad was confused at first. His dad had no idea what his son was doing because he was flipping through the pages of the sports program. His son had garnered the attention of this cheerleader and he had no idea.

The exchange between the cheerleader and that boy and between that boy and his father were so powerful to me that I couldn't help but start to cry. Not a loud fit of tears, of course, but just this little release of emotion that couldn't wait to be poured out. It's times like these when I love to be alone.

The father smiled to his son in a way that struck me deeply. I so badly wanted to feel a part of that somehow, to somehow capture that boy's feelings. To have that father, a complete stranger to me, beam down at me and put his hand on my shoulder as if saying, "I love you son, way to go!"

I started to think about how silly I was acting. "Get it together," I told myself. And I eventually did, you know. But for that instance, for whatever brief of time, I wanted that middle aged man to give me the reaction that he had just given to his son. I didn't care what I needed to do. For some reason I needed that exchange from him, I thought tearfully. It's maybe like I imagined it might be... when I was young.