My Right Foot---Day 20: I Wanna Go Outside and Play

I used to know this kid who sold rocks on the street corner in the summer. Like a lemonade stand. Only it was rocks. Just ordinary rocks. He’d tried selling lemonade, but you have to have money to buy the lemonade and stuff, he explained. With rocks there was no start-up costs and no overhead. Besides, he didn’t feel as fervently about lemonade as he did about his rocks.

The sheer novelty of it caused a neighborhood sensation. People were actually stopping to buy his rocks. Rocks they could pick up for free themselves if they just bent over.

“How do you find your rocks?” I asked him.

“I just look at the ground and look really carefully.”

It’s like that with writing most of the time.

I’m serious about writing. But I’m not a serious writer.

I’m not the sort of writer who can move people with my prose. Sometimes I try. Occasionally, I even succeed. No trick to it really. I just look at the ground and look really carefully.

If I sporadically drift into the more serious stuff on this blog---well, most of the time it’s because I have nothing funny to write about.

However, if Nonsense were a profession… Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t be waiting tables, I can tell you that much.

Between furious blogging over the past few days and my seasonal allergies taking a real toll, I woke up this morning completely wiped.

Didn’t help that I’ve had coughing fits all night for the past few days. But I go thru this every year. It’s bothersome. Sometimes embarrassing. And occasionally painful when you’re doubled up crying with a coughing fit. But I probably have the strongest abs in town. This morning, I consider writing a book. Coughing Your Way to Terrific Abs.

I make myself laugh and cough some more.

Then I crawl back into bed.

An hour and a half later, I wake up and realize that I’d overslept. I show up late to my own film shoot. Coughing.

In between coughs, I start to lose my voice. My friend Nina suggests I go to a doctor. I sigh. And cough. She has allergies, too. She suggests I ask for an inhaler.

An inhaler? I don’t want to be one of those inhaler people.

I cough some more. Suddenly, everyone there starts encouraging me to go see and doctor and get something.

A high-pitched little moan comes out of my mouth and I manage to squeak out the words, “But I wanna go outside and play.”

After the shoot today, I decided to walk thru the park. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, my allergies would be better if I were actually in closer proximity to the pollen. After all, I didn’t start to get allergies till I moved to New York. Maybe it wasn’t the flowers, but the skyscrapers causing the problem. Maybe what I needed was a little pollen vaccine.

A friend of mine and I had talked about doing something on Friday. I got to the park and watched the kids playing on the swings and slides. I wanted to play, too. I reached into my bag to get my cell and then remembered that my battery had died during the shoot.

Oh well. I never had a problem playing by myself.

And then I saw this:

Apparently, the very first rule of the playground is that adults unaccompanied by children can’t play!

But what if I want to swing on the swing?

I know they’re just trying to keep out the perverts, but why can’t I play?

Sure, I know I could probably go swing on the swing and nobody would say anything. But those darn kids are monopolizing all the swings.

And do I really want to be the creepy lady hogging the swing? Taking photos of her foot?

Sometimes it sucks to be a grown-up.

As I walked away from the park, I found myself actually pouting. Pouting. It’s not fair. I wanna play, too.

And then I heard a little jingle.

And then I saw this:

And, just like that, my frown turned upside-down. One good thing about being a grown-up, you don’t have to run inside crying to Mom to give you a dollar for ice cream.

I bought a Dreamsickle and sat down on the ground to eat it.

As I ate my ice cream bar, a mother walked by with two kids. They saw the ice cream truck, too and started screaming for ice cream. She told them to be quiet and pulled them away. They cried.

Maybe I can't swing on the swing---but at least I get ice cream.

Back in Minneapolis, I wrote a story for the weekly on Nathan. The Rock Boy. One article later, he was a local celebrity. People were coming to the neighborhood to look for him and buy his rocks. He was recognized at the Minnesota State Fair. Cops from another precinct brought over a rock tumbler and some rocks to give to this odd little kid. And, at the paper, I received a package one day addressed to me. The note inside was in Old Lady Handwriting and simply read, “My boys are all grown now. Will you get these to this boy.” Inside, some books on rocks and insects were neatly wrapped around a copy of the article on Nathan.

It was the largest piece I’d written for the paper since I’d been there. For the first time in my life, I really felt I’d written something that people connected with. Well, I’d OVER-WRITTEN something and my editor made some cuts. But still…it was all me. I’d done good.

I also felt like I’d ruined something innocent.

I’d been so inspired by Nathan’s imagination that I took it, made it my own; and, by doing so, ruined the simple pastime of a child selling rocks in front of his house.

I didn’t mean for him to become a celebrity. I had just looked at the ground, and looked really carefully. And there was Nathan. Selling his rocks.

I couldn’t help but be inspired.

Ever since then, I’ve been careful not to ruin the purity of the Nathans. He was just outside playing. I was looking for a story.

Today, I thank the people who play---just for the sake of playing. Who do things simply for the joy of doing it. As writers, we don’t mean to exploit you. It's just that you inspire us. And sometimes, I think we’re jealous that we can’t play, too.