Grow Up!

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." 1 Corinthians 13:11

As I drank my fortitude, my eyes scanned a blue toy rocking horse covered in mud on the L Train tracks.

I closed my eyes and instantly pictured a dirty round face of a blond boy. His eyelashes were wet with tears peering out the graffitied window as the train left the station and his friend behind....

Running late, his mom had tripped down the stairs, ripping a hole in her scrubs and had nearly missed the Carnasie Local. As she pulled his little arm into the closing doors, his hand got caught and knocked the toy into the gap of the platform. His first lesson in loss.

His second came a year later when his baby sister entered his life and their two room walk up. Not enough room for four, dad exited out the back door for the final time.

The musician boyfriend who soon came to stay bought him a brown and beige Fisher Price 45 player as a consolation prize. With mom on the graveyard nursing shift, he spent many a nights alone, sitting on his shag carpet listening to the B Side of Percy Sledge's When A Man Loves a Woman.

He skipped school often, had a run in with the cops over a dime bag of marijuana, played his second hand guitar on the stoop until neighbors hung their heads out the windows to holler..."go home" and fell in love with a new wave punk who resembled Aimee Mann from Til Tuesday. She broke his heart. He wore black eyeliner as a statement. And poured out his damaged soul to the weary crowds of The Bowery Poetry Club week after week. He was on his way....

As the years passed, he traded in his guitar strap for a briefcase handle and a well adjusted life at a desk. He met his future wife at a bar off Wall Street one random Thursday night. She wore a strand of pearls and told him she had an affinity for men in starched white button downs. They married in June and when they merged possessions, his dust covered albums took a top shelf in the hall closet.

This was the beginning of the unforeseen end.

One evening, avoiding the tension at home, he took a detour by Beth Israel Hospital where his hard working mom had missed his childhood and down into the tunnel of that fateful station.

A hipster kid no older than 19, dressed in beat up overalls played his acoustic guitar in the corner. The case was splayed open; a few dollar bills hung over the lip.

As he stared down at the littered tracks, he took his graying head in his hands and asked himself out loud.."Where did I let the time go?"

I opened my eyes as my commuter train screeched into the station. And sighed.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been. " George Eliot

Must adulthood always choke the child within?