Second Childhood

No.496 in 'A Story a Day for a Year - and then some!'

SECOND CHILDHOOD

They say that don’t they – about men of a certain age and women too, when they’re old as houses or hills and shrunk to less than they once were and they don’t walk straight or steady and they can’t see without glasses and their thoughts are always running like rabbits away from them and they laugh for no reason and shake their heads and won’t ever tell what it is they were laughing at – they say then, don’t they, that he’s in his second childhood, or she is.

And I am.

I saw a bear once, tied to the earth by a short chain and a thick wooden peg hammered into the ground so it was fixed there. And a girl beside the bear, sitting on a three-legged wooden stool. Oh, she was pretty enough but it was the bear you were to look at. Maybe it was in its second childhood too for its eyes were rheumy and a silver spittle thread unspooled from its mouth and it grumbled under its hot stinking breath. Then the pretty-enough girl drew an old tin whistle from beneath the folds of her dress and she put it to her kissing lips and played a sweet and silly tune. Well, the bear rose up tall on its hind legs and began dancing; dad-dancing they call it these days – these new-fangled days – and they mean old-man dancing, which is to say heavy-footed and slow and not quite in step with the music. A show of dancing is what they mean.

And this morning in the garden, which sometimes feels like the whole wide world, suddenly I heard music – at least in my head, I did – and I couldn’t help myself. It was like my feet were the feet of a much younger man, and I started dancing; old-bear dancing the boys called it and I do not think they were being unkind or even that they knew what it was to see a bear dancing.

It is no matter. What mattered was the music and the lifting of one foot after another and laughing – did I say that I laughed – and the memory of that old bear and the girl, the pretty-enough girl who when I remember her is more and more pretty. And in my head, which after all is almost all that memory is, the girl got up from the three-legged stool and she kicked up her heels and danced along with the old bear, taking one of its paws in her small hand and with the other hand stroking its hollow cheek.

And maybe she kissed that old bear – I like to think she did. And if that’s what being in a second childhood is – fanciful and fey – then maybe they’re right with all that they say, but really it is no matter to me for in my head I am both the girl dancing and the bear being kissed.