My book club pals are busy reading all the edgy titles.
I, meanwhile, just finished “Heidi, the Great Illustrated Classic.”
My friends are discussing books about wars and overcoming abusive childhoods.
My speed of late is to join a Nancy Drew book club.
Same with movies. The kids are upstairs doing a retro thing with Hitchcock movies; I can hear the screeches of “Psycho.”
I’m downstairs falling asleep to “The Sound of Music” and “The Walton’s Christmas Movie.”
Life as a pandemic adult is grueling.
And the antidote, I’ve found, lies in childhood.
Never mind the famous quote: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Sometimes we just need a bag of penny candy and a coloring book.
My sister Susan gets this.
She feeds me all’s-well-that-ends-well holiday movie titles, like “The Bishop’s Wife,” about a real-life angel who shows up to revive the relationship of a struggling couple at Christmas.
I ended the movie shutting my eyes tight and whispering, “I do believe in angels. I do believe in angels. I do. I do. I do.”
Not that I’m not also rooted in adult responsibility and three-ply masks.
For my birthday just passed, Susan gave me President Obama’s new autobiography.
She also gave me a box of stuffed barnyard puppets to play with, and a Christmas coloring book, that I color in not with my expensive coloring markers, but a 48-cent box of 24 crayons I found in the kids’ old craft cabinet.
I have yet to crack the Obama book beyond the dust jacket. The coloring book I’ve drawn in six times, my crayons gliding over the page with the sweet familiarity of a lollipop in my mouth.
Life is a disaster movie.
Why watch one in my off hours when I can color?
We all need comforting right now. Many of us aging adults don’t have a mommy whose lap we can lay our heads in.
Coloring in a coloring book takes us back to a time when somebody else was deciding what to make for dinner.
This by no means is a case for childhood regression, mind you. Taking adult responsibility is key to survival more than ever right now.
This is a case for touching the muscle memory of childhood, recalling those moments of simplicity, ease and security, that are still inside, perhaps longing to be revisited.
"Like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us,” said the late French philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
"Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,” said “Narnia” author C.S. Lewis.
It can be as simple as skipping down the sidewalk. Or wearing a “Let it Snow” face mask. We can delight in snow flakes, look for deer at dusk and squeal with delight when we see one.
We can watch “Miracle on 34th Street” and remember what it was to believe in Santa.
We can even for a brief moment, reconsider the possibility.
When I lose myself between the lines of a Christmas tree in a coloring book, I loosen one part of myself and find another smiling back in memory, imagination and unmitigated pleasure.
“See the world through the eyes of your inner child. The eyes that sparkle in awe and amazement as they see love, magic and mystery in the most ordinary things,” said writer Henna Sohail.
There’s a meme making the rounds that speaks especially to the seriousness of being a responsible adult in these absurd times.
“When you’re a little kid, you can’t wait to be a teenager,” so the meme goes. “When you’re a teenager, you can’t wait to be an adult. When you’re an adult, you just want to be a cat.”
I can’t be a cat.
But there is still a kid living inside me.
“Come on over for Christmas cocoa,” I would say to all my friends if I could. “Let’s sit in our Rudolph slippers by the fireplace and watch for Santa to come down the chimney.”
For a moment, maybe more, I would believe.
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