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Pete Hurrey's Dog Day Afternoons by Pete Hurrey
Dog-Day Afternoon #107/07/2008Viewed 0 times Lets talk energy; no, not that kind of energy. The price at the pumps and for gas and fuel oil is depressing enough without hashing it over here. Lets talk about the true energy, the kind we all have bottled up inside from the moment of conception. Wait! Don’t go rolling your eyes. We’re not talking about clairvoyance, ESP, or any of that stuff either. We’re talking about the energy we see in children. You know, that energy we at one time or another have said as adults, “If they could only bottle that kid’s energy, we wouldn’t need to worry about the price of gas.” You see when we’re young, and dumb and naive and running around in short pants, the body produces loads of energy. Remember as a kid playing until dark, running, and hiding and seeking and capturing the flag? We didn’t get tired – ever. And, when we eventually did, we just collapsed into a great sleep and awoke refreshed for the next day. That energy changes in puberty. Other things get more attention than who’s it. But, that’s not the kind of energy we’re talking about today, either. As a teen, we seem to have limitless energy. The kind where we’ll spend hours working hard to figure out how to get out of chores, but complain if we have to take out the trash or clean our rooms. Then we turn to the decade of our 20s and we still have millions of gigawatts of internal power, except now that power channels itself to the weekends and all night parties and barhopping, and dancing until the dawn, running on the beach, or cruising the strip. We never get tired, do we? Somewhere around our mid- to late-30s we wake up one morning and roll over in bed and suddenly the world has changed. There is a wife or a husband that wasn’t there the day before. Were they? Into our once private domains, come walking in a couple of kids, wanting breakfast. We get up and our backs are stiff. Our heads are already spinning about the boss, or the checkbook, or the price of gas and bills, and suddenly all that youthful energy seems to have faded a bit. That’s okay, we think, we have more important things to do than to go barhopping and carousing all night. After all, we have “significants” now. Time to earn a real living and plan for the future, blah, blah, blah … Then one day we wake up and look in the mirror and there’s a stranger looking back. Ugh! Where did we go? There are gray hairs where ours used to be or bare skin – even worse! It takes us longer to get out of bed and to get ready for work. Cutting the grass on the weekends used to be no big deal, but now we take two or three breaks, maybe even a couple of days to do what we did in an hour. Ugh! Where did all that energy go? When we reach into our 50s and 60s, the energy seems to have gone from us. Our brains, however, work a whole lot better than they used to – do you remember this many stupid kids when we were growing up? – but, the body doesn’t cooperate nearly as much. Some one may ask us, “What are you doing for the forth of July? We shrug our shoulders and look oddly them before we say, “I don’t know. Staying home and watching the race.” The thought of driving into a mess and watching 10 minutes of fireworks from behind a couple of thousand kids that had the energy to show up hours before leaves us cold. Perhaps, that’s the way it should be … although, I sure wish that kid would come around my place on weekends and do all those damn honey-dos that keep showing up. |
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