How to Become a Grown Up

Growing up, in the house next to our, a single mother and her teenage son lived.

Now, this guys eventually grew up to be a car sales man, complete with all the attributes that follows one such. But back then, he was a teenaged hard rocker with a motorbike, that he liked to work on during days off school.

My mother used to hate this motorbike, with passion, as the boy would fling the dirty, oily cloths he had used on the bike (not on purpose, I´m sure) on her roses. I would just admire the fact that he was a teenager. How lucky he was!

Small input on the matter: When we were children, we were always in a hurry to grow up. In retrospect, that seems quite ironic, as I know I have spent a large part of my adulthood wishing I was a child again. But back then, all things that seemed to be fun, exciting and cool would happen to you after the age of 17. People that age were allowed to wear cool clothes in bright colors (come on, it was the end of the 80's) drive cars and listen to cool music... not to mention go to high school and use cool words in their vocabulary.

Back to our story again. It was a particulary lazy summer afternoon. My best friend and I, as per usual, had nothing to do. Thus, we decided that we would transform my mother's old storing shed in the garden into our new club house. The club's purpose would be to sit and talk about cool things, this including our top secret plan to collect money through yard sales, travel to the USA and become famous.

We didn't really ask for permission to put all my mother's gardening tools and furniture out in the garden (we just did, as children do) but said and done, we spent all remaining day and the following collecting things for our new club house, carrying things in and out of that garden shed. And finally, it was ready and fit for our secret club meetings.

As I recall it (and mind you, these are recollections of things happening at age 8 or 9) the club house was absolutely spectacular. Being a garden shed, it had a lock on the door and an electrical outlet, which enabled us to listen to music through an old boom box, stolen by my best friend from her older brother´s room. We had also furnished our secret lair with an old rug, a small 2-seated couch, a very small table, blankets and a few posters of exclusively cool people (such as Michael Jackson) to cover the walls. A small corner of the shed, consealed behind a curtain and blue colored shelves, was still used for storage, as my mother was not too happy to find all her gardening things out on the lawn when she arrived home the day before. Nonetheless, we had our own place, with a lock and a key... and boy, that made us feel cool! We never wanted to leave this heaven on earth, and were even considering spending the night in our little shed-turned-clubhouse. Of course, since the shed was made of wood, with concrete floors, it was cold in there even during the summer. Thus, it wasnt really a suitable place to spend the night, according to our parents. We, however, disagreed. Following this, one of the things discussed in the club house was therefore how to pull off spending the night in the club house without our parents knowledge.

The teenage boy next door had, as customary with teenagers, a lot of friends over from time to time. This particular teenage boy had a lot of female friends, who used to come and sunbathe in his garden, chatting about teenage topics, while listening to music and having lemonade on sunny days. When we learnt that such important happenings were occuring just on the other side of the wall (the back wall of the shed faced the neighbour's lawn) we quickly found a knothole in the unpolished wooden walls of our club house, where we could spy on these gatherings. Oh, how glamorous to be able to wear a bikini, gracefully sipping lemonade while sunbathing! These girls would twirl their long, beautiful hair and cheerfully laugh at jokes, displaying their perfect smiles. We just had to be like them!

The path to true beauty comes through exercise and eating right, so we had heard. That's how it came about that two of the neighbourhood's skinniest 8-year-olds started to do daily aerobic sessions to the instructions of Jane Fonda (through an old video tape my mother bought but quickly lost interest in). It went without saying that the workout was to be performed in contemporary teenage-fashion type outfits: tights, bathing suit, a broad belt on the waist and a white sweat band on the forehead.

This excercise session was followed by a breakfast consisting of swallowing an entire raw egg, for so we had seen people do in american movies. We were one step closer to our true goal; being grown ups, doing what grown up people do!

As I am sitting here, writing this text, I cannot help but wondering if I can go back to being a child again. Little did we know back then that being a grown up involves constantly making up silly excuses NOT to go to the gym, skipping breakfast and never (I mean NEVER) have time to sunbathe, twirl your hair and sip lemonade!

Maybe I can empty my mother's garden shed again and turn it into a club house?