Being an adult is hard but growing up is optional. How that philosophy rules your world, defines you as a person. If you are too adult, you are serious and cynical. If too child-like, immature and unrealistic. Sometimes, you just have to be baby bear's porridge - just right.
I love my childlike wonder. I love I can see the world as though it had never been witnessed by me. My childhood was spent on the road. Being the child of divorced parents, every second weekend, I would ride the familiarity back to my Dad's place. Every tree in it's place, every rock sturdy in formation. It was the time before technology so all I had to keep myself entertained for that hour was Dad's collection of crooners or Australian country singers, and the dullness of the outside world.
1976 model kombi's were a symbol of my growing up. It was more often than not, my Dad's only car. It changed occasionally; a fiat here, a holden ute there, but the burnt umber red or shiny light green was seen after the familiar putt-putt-putt-putt of the air cooled idling engine was heard. Kombi's weren't an uncommon sight in the late eighties, early nineties. It was often played as a way to entertain siblings when you had an opportunity to hit them while yelling "punch-buggy." Your parents would smile, revelling in the permitted violence in the back seats. Being an only child on the trips with my Dad, the idea of hitting him was not one I fondly imagined. So, I sang the songs as best as my childhood self could and watched the world fly by.
One particular trip to Sydney early one Sunday morning, I was probably feeling tired and irritable, mainly because we had to leave Dad's house by five in the morning. Our destination - Paddington Markets, out near Liverpool. The road back then was a cavalcade of highway. The only freeway was the section connecting the southern end of the central coast to Sydney. Every other road was traffic and pothole riddled, even at early o'clock on a Sunday morning. The commute on a good run was two hours. Dad would wrap me in the scratchy Onkiporinga blanket and strap me into the passenger seat. The pinks, browns and yellow squares offered a warmth unparalleled to anything else available at the time. It would take a decent amount of time for the kombi to warm up so while I was still little enough to lift, I was carried and allowed to sleep for a bit longer when we hit the road. When I awoke to the mouth of suburban Sydney, the traffic had started to build and I was hungry, so as was our routine, we would stop in at the massive Pennant Hills McDonalds. There Dad would take a smoke break while I got dressed in the back of the car, all the curtains drawn for my privacy. Dad had set the back of the car up for camping but when not in use, everything was tucked away allowing minimal standing room for a six year old. From there, we would continue another hour until we reached our destination with the rest of the west bound traffic.
After hours of looking at tools, tools and other variations of tools, it was time to hop back in the kombi, this time to return me home to Newcastle. The added hour always made me irritable. In his frustration, however genius as it was, Dad mentioned to me how I'd never seen this part of the road before. As we'd been making the trek for months in some sections, I scoffed. He said to me in his thick Italian accent, "No, you may not have seen this sight before, Sally. You don't know if a tree has fallen over while we were away. The leaves could be a different colour to when you saw them last."
My eyes and my world widened. I saw a new realm of possibility, my imagination allowed to run freely. Were there koalas and kangaroos I was not privy to, had a rock rolled down a cliff face during the insurmountable rain we'd had the last month. Life on the road was never dull, nor boring anymore.
I still hold that wonder. I wake up and notice the arrival of the ever changing seasons, the palette of variety open for me to witness each and every day. The adult side of me looks at the lawn and says, I really need to mow that, but the child-like imaginative side of me sends my body running through the tall, damp strands and rolling over to feel the softness and squishiness of the morning dew. That balance is me. It will be me for a long time. And should I lose it, well, the world will have been become too dull for me to enjoy anyway.
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