The Follies of Adulthood

“Papá?”

I could tell from the tiny tremors in her voice that my daughter had bad news. No wonder she’d waited until we’d crossed the street from her school and were climbing into the car to say anything.

“What is it?” I asked, hoping the timbre of my voice disguised the million-and-one worries racing through my mind. 

She squinted, pressing back tears. “I got two folder marks this week.”

I took her backpack and unzipped it as she slumped into the backseat. Inside her yellow folder was an orange card stock calendar on which her third grade teacher had documented her transgressions. Tuesday’s offense? Laughing. Today’s? Playing.

I chuckled. Or maybe I guffawed, because my daughter stiffened with surprise.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

The implication was, of course, that my daughter had been laughing and playing when she should have been focusing on school. But the message’s delivery disheartened me. What was being impressed upon her young mind? That there are times when one must sit still and quietly pay attention, or that she must temper her fun, playful nature?

For a moment, I resented her teacher. Who was she to squash my daughter’s precious childishness? But just as my cheeks had flushed with anger, my memory flashed to a time my daughter’s kindness caught me off guard.

Just last Friday my wife and I, accustomed to feeding a family of four, found ourselves entertaining six. Both kids had invited a friend to spend the night. Neither of us felt like cooking, so we took the easy way out and ordered pizzas.

Well, one was delivered with errant cuts randomly crisscrossing the pie. Instead of eight neat slices, we had to distribute an odd number of weirdly shaped masses. “What kind of idiot did this?” I muttered, frustrated by the fruits of the anonymous pizza cutter’s skill-less labor.

My daughter, with the kind of gently severe wisdom only available to young children, looked at me patiently and said, “Maybe it was their first time.”

There’s a certain heaviness that comes with age, and I don’t mean the one that stubbornly encircles my midsection. I mean that cruddy residue built up from years of income tax returns, performance reviews, and PTA meetings; that visceral fat of the mind that insulates thoughts and replaces bold curiosity with cozy capitulation.

When I was a kid, I owned my attention. Sure, I would sometimes lend it to an adult. But I’d quickly snatch it back to lose myself in the movies that played upon the screen of my imagination, fueled by fantasy. At some point, though, I surrendered my attention to that most adult of pursuits. How often have I answered my daughter’s invitations to play with that wretched phrase, “I’m sorry, I have work to do”? I’ve treated work, that leechy time-squatter, as sacrosanct — and for what?

I didn’t resent her teacher anymore; I understood her. We were both hostages of time, and I imagined she yearned for freedom as much as I did. I wanted to don a Buccaneer hat and an eyepatch, commandeer a Spanish galleon, and sail away to some distant island beyond the burdens of adulthood. I’d line up my troubles and turn the cannon toward them!

Bang! Sink, joyless obligation, into the murky abyss!

Pow! Away, weight of worry! May the barnacles feast upon ye!

Kaboom! Be gone, shackles of should, ye dreary fun-squelchers!

Wham! I shut the car door and sat in the driver’s seat looking out past the line of traffic towards the school playground. Kids ran amok while their parents stood idly around the perimeter gazing into their cell phones.

My daughter leaned forward nervously, gripping the seat in front of her. “Papá! What was so funny?”

“Sweetheart,” I replied, raising my eyes to hers through the rearview mirror. “Adults are fools.”