They Tell Me I’ll Miss All This Someday
by
Chinese water torture.
That’s the most accurate way I can describe what it’s like having two, sometimes three kids, fresh out of school, all hopped up after sitting in class all day, coming home and invading what for the previous seven hours had been a quiet, peaceful sanctuary.
It’s actually kind of nice, at first, to see and hear their youthful exuberance as they bounce from room to room, laughing and screaming and yelling along the way. Having this kind of youthful energy in a home is good for the soul.
For a while.
It doesn’t take long, though, for one’s appreciation of their youthfulness to dwindle, especially when one is trying to write, read, or maybe even take one’s daily afternoon nap.
It always amazes me how just a few of these diminutive yet spirited creatures, when playing who-knows-what in the room directly above you, can sound exactly like a stampeding herd of wildebeests. I mean, the noise! How do I even put it into words? All that laughing and screaming and bouncing and yelling blends together in a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard/dentist-drill/sledgehammer-on-a-spike kind of cacophony that no closed door and no amount of volume on one’s radio can prevent from finding and penetrating one’s ear canals.
After just 15 minutes of this, the initial drip, drip, drip of their youthful energy begins to feel like the pound, pound, pound of a ball-pine hammer on one’s skull.
The problem is, there is no escape. Through some inexplicable twist of fate, I have been made responsible for the safety and wellbeing of these little cherubs (at least from 3-5pm), and it would not be proper for me to do what I’d really like to do, which is to run out the front door, jump in my car, and race to the nearest tavern, where I might calm my frazzled nerves with an ice-cold IPA or two.
But of course, if I did that I’d get arrested and thrown in jail. And that wouldn’t be good.
A lot quieter, for sure. But definitely not good.~
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Copyright © 2017 Valentine J. Brkich