Searching for a shoe horn

Do you remember the day when you realized that you became too big to do something you used to do? Do you remember those little rides outside of shops that you put a coin in and moves back and forth? Granted, these were not the most exciting thing in the world, you didn’t go anywhere and generally, the machines don’t work as well as they should. But it didn’t matter what shape they were in, as long as they worked, and in that moment, you were an astronaut heading toward the moon, a cowboy on a horse or even a sidekick to your favorite character.
Yesterday I saw a kid who was trying to get into a little automated helicopter, but he was too big. First he tried to get his legs in and then his chest and head, but he realized that his chest wouldn’t bend in the way that he needed, so he would have to take another approach. He got out and then tried it the other way. I was walking by, but my gaze remained stuck to this child, I felt sad.
For me, it was the swing set in the backyard of my grandmother’s house. I loved that set; it was my own private Disneyland, except I didn’t have to go anywhere.
When I was little, my life was divided between two places: Madrid during the school terms and Miami three times a year during vacation. There were many months in between my visits to Miami. One summer, I went to swing on the swing sets and they began to come off the floor. I was too big for it. I had superseded the weight limit and was no longer able to swing on the set. Still, for a couple of years after that, I tried to compromise with the swing set. I sat on it gingerly and swung low so as to not cause it to fall over. It eventually went to my smaller cousins and I was no longer allowed to go on it.
I mourned the loss of the swing set, my swing set, and I resented my cousins for being small enough to play on them, I hated myself for being a big and fat kid. The swing set was an obvious life change. One day I was just too big. But what happens to those things that change so gradually that you do not realize how it has changed until everything is different.
A child’s education (generally) is structured as a construction-deconstruction model. The child is taught the strictest moral and ethical code by which to live by and then is sent out and allowed to have life, through experience and personal error, to teach them that these principles are nothing but an utopist model that is impossible to live by successfully in this society without being an outcast.
Black and white and right and wrong have slowly changed in their definitions as the years have gone by. You would think that the relaxing of these strict codes has made things like decisions and life easier to live with, that would be an incorrect assumption. When things were straight forward, at least it was easier to know what you could and could not do. You could blame the outcome of events on rules or other people, the things you actually did do were the things that you were supposed to do, the right foot followed the left foot and vice versa.
My principles when I was 8 were as follows: lying is always wrong; cheating is always wrong; drinking is always wrong; drugs are always wrong; my mother is always right; my teachers know everything; death is something that happens to old people; the doctor can always cure you when you are sick. Good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell.
My principles now: lying well, that depends, will it hurt anyone? How big is the lie? Will one small lie benefit many people?; cheating, well, you would have to analyze the relationship and not judge people’s circumstances, you never know what happens behind closed doors; drinking, am I driving?; drugs, who didn’t go to college?; my mother can be wrong… sometimes a lot; I have outgrown some of my teachers, they can no longer teach me anything new, need new teachers, teachers come in different forms and not all have blackboards; cancer exists, it is not curable, people die, we don’t know where it comes from, 90% of activities give you cancer. Cancer is not the only thing; there is HPV, AIDS, MS, and NMD… no cures yet. I’m not sure there is a heaven, but I have met a lot of “good” people and heaven seems like a very self righteous and boring place, I’ll be in hell at the bar with Danny. OR maybe I’ll reincarnate, or maybe I’ll ascend to the next plane or maybe Mars or maybe…
What shades my blacks, whites and grays are also depend on the day. At the core I’m still very black and white, very yes or no, very do it or don’t.
Trying to fit new ideas into old principles is a little like trying to fit a size 40 foot into a size 37 foot. You need a stocking, a shoe horn, some stubbornness and a high threshold for pain. Sometimes, it’s hard to realize that you need new shoes; they can even be the same model, just a bigger size because you have more to fit into them.
I also used to have these green shoes in the shape of pigs that I loved. I didn’t care that they would color my feet green and that I couldn’t get it off for days. I kind of still wish that I could fit into those shoes again, and it was a sad day when my enormous elephant feet became too big to go into them.
As I got older, I had to let go of things that I did and thought of as a child. I still have a hard time letting go, I yearn for the world that I saw as more black and white and right and wrong; standing in my pig shoes. But when you start walking through life, you realize that you need variety and that if you walk long enough, your feet change and grow and you need new shoes that fit your feet better.
When the world gets hard and tiring, when you don’t know if you’re walking in the right direction or if you are making the right decisions, sometimes all you want to do is get a big shoehorn, stuff your feet into your old shoes and ride the horsy outside the Chinese shop on the street. Then you keep walking and you see a pair of sequined stiletto heels and a coffee shop, and life is not so hard anymore.