The Kid in You.

I got a new job a few weeks ago.

Correction, I got another job a few weeks ago.

I was lucky enough to keep my old job for security as this new position tries me on.  I split my hours between my old job and this new job doing graphic design for a life science museum.

I get to spend a lot of time in the hidden parts of a museum, the off-the-map here there be monsters void that dazzles any child's imagination.  What goes on at a school at night?  What happens in the museum after hours? What on earth goes on in a teachers' lounge?

The place has been closed for months for renovations (a whole building got added last year) and now that the opening is impending, they're hiring to get ready.  So, in addition to helping design exciting works of art like pamphlets and visitors guides - wheeee! - I spend a lot of time in the basement surrounded by creepy taxidermy.  Shelves of shriveled shrews and cataloged cobras. Gigantic jars of jellyfish, flasks of fish, squishy squids in slimy solutions. Drawers of desiccated dung beetles.  Such is all I have for company for 10 hours a week until we get to move into the new offices.  An uncharted, unknown underground railroad of the animal kingdom preserved for zoological study.  This is what the museum doesn't display.

My wife would love it.

Like a kid on Christmas morning.


B. and I decided a long time ago that it was best we met when and where we did.  Had we met any later, we wouldn't have started dating.  Any earlier, we wouldn't have been ready for each other.

In short, she beat up kids like me in high school.


I often wonder what it would be like to meet her as a high schooler ,as a thirteen-year-old, as a third-grader.  Where is the kid in her?

It's there, in the basement of the museum.

As a kid, she asked Santa for a microscope.  She treasured her Harry Potter along with the rest of us, but she also cherished her Encyclopedia of Mammals.

As a kid, my wife was a nerd.

She still is today, and it's so hot.

There are still aspects of my own childhood that survived the gauntlet of adolescence.  I still have juvenile tendencies that annoy her, perplex her and even at times endear myself to her.  I major in doodling.  I have websites of cartooning.  I study concept art for motion pictures and video games.

To the untrained eye, one would think I never grew up.  Where's the kid in me?

He's hunched over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, eyes glued to Saturday morning cartoons.

If/when we have our own kid, I have a feeling our inner kids will come out to play a lot more.  I'll sit and watch looney tunes with my kiddo while B. sleeps in.  She'll subtly slip in science-y educational birthday presents into the mix over the years.  We'll take our kid to museums, both art and science. Three kids wondering at the world on the greatest field trips ever.

I still see the kid in her.  As she tells me excitedly about the just plain coolness of nature, I catch glimpses of that elementary school nerd saving up for a lab coat to go with her microscope.  She sees the kid in me anytime we go see an action movie/cartoon/anything that should be too juvenile for a taxpaying adult.  We let each other geek out, and each time we do, it helps us travel back in time to our days as singular souls searching for each other.

Where's the kid in you?

What is he like?


S