AussieBrit In The WinterSpring
Posted: 4/15/2010
Written By: Matt
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It is the middle of April. I should be getting home from work, enjoying dinner, and then taking my family on a walk through the park to see if the kids can find any early flowers or budding trees.
Instead, the wind chill is -8 degrees and we are due for 4 to 7 inches of snow in the next 24 hours. When I get home from work, I am going to make sure my snow shovel is still within easy reach for tomorrow morning.
WinterSpring is no fun. But as I drove down a blustery street at lunch time, I ran through a drive-thru. The boy who took my order had a very unique accent a little bit Sydney and a little bit London. When I pulled up to the window to pay, I saw that he looked to be of high-school age, or just past, and I could not think of why an AussieBrit would be in Michigan in the middle of WinterSpring working a drive-thru window.
“That’s not a Michigan accent,” I said as I handed him a five dollar bill.
“No, it’s not.” He replied, his accent as thick as ever.
As he handed me my change, he said in perfect Midwestern devoid of any European, “I’m from a few blocks away. I just like having fun back here. It gets kinda lonely, you know?”
I laughed out loud.
Hours later, my day is still brighter because of a bored high school kid.
It presents, however, a troubling question for me. Have I become too old?
In my youth, I would have done the same thing, or something just as off-the-wall. Now, it would never enter my mind to do something like that to make a dull day brighter. Somehow, childhood looks at the necessary points in life and finds ways to redeem them. Adulthood, calloused and tired, pushes through the necessary points with force and complaining because it assumes that the fun stuff will come later. But by the time we get past the necessary, we are too exhausted for the fun.
Last week, I read an article about employees at video game stores. One of them said that his days are so dreadful that to get through them, he plays banter games with his coworkers. When the store is busy, the employees never have time for more than chance words with each other, so as they pass, one will say some non sequitur like “No you didn’t!”
The other, without missing a step, will reply with a comment with no context, such as, “I swear. I got it for two bucks at Charlie’s.”
Silly. Stupid. Fun. Adulthood lacks the silly and the fun. If we are not careful, we are left with just the stupid.
My work conversations revolve around data structures, business metrics, and software versioning. But perhaps, with a little luck, all is not lost. Perhaps I can learn a few things from AussieBrit before I bypass growing up and end up with growing old. Perhaps there is a balance left for me.
Tomorrow, I am going to have to shovel my driveway on a crisp WinterSpring morning. I think I’ll bundle up my kids with me so they can remind me how to find the fun in the necessary and knock a few crusty ice chunks off a curmudgeonly OldYoung man.
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