Advertisement

firehouse pizza banner

Cheryl Hughes: Adult

On Saturday, my granddaughter, Sabria, and I went to Walmart.  I haven’t been inside that store since this pandemic began, and I swore nothing could get me to go back inside until there was a vaccine for the virus.  I underestimated the tug of Nickelodeon slime and a box of kitchen matches on a nine-year-old with allowance money.  Sabria loves all things slime, and she wanted the box of matches so she could show her mother all the colors the flame on a match contains in that one flicker of light.  We built our own spectrograph the day before then tried it on different light sources.  The match was her favorite.

Before we got out of our car at Walmart, we put on our masks and bathed in GermX.  I instructed Sabria to not touch anything in the store unnecessarily and to give others plenty of room.  After we entered the store, I looked up the location of slime and kitchen matches on the Walmart App, and we found the items pretty quickly.  I told Sabria we were going to use the self-checkout.  

We waited in line for our turn, and when we got to the scanner, I stepped back and let her read the instructions.  She scanned her items then put them in a bag.  She inserted her bills and waited for her change.  She picked up her change, put the receipt in the bag with the slime and matches, and we were on our way.

“I’m an adult now,” she said, looking up at me with a self-satisfied smile.

“Yes, you are,” I said.

On the way to Sabria’s house, I thought about the first time I was allowed to place the money I earned from doing chores onto the counter of a country store.  I bought a package of maple sugar fudge.  I felt so grown up.  Often, I think we look at certain events and point to those as the proof of our adulthood.  We graduate from school—we are adults.  We get our first job—we are adults.  We get married—we are adults.  We have children—surely, we are adults now.

The thing is, we have been constantly morphing from children into adults all our lives.  (Norman Lear said Carl Reiner was successful because he understood that we all remain children living in adult skin as if wearing a costume.)  The first time we fry an egg and flip it over without breaking the yellow or the first time we wash the dishes (even if we have to stand in a chair to reach the sink) or the first time we write a check, those are the small accomplishments that propel us forward toward adulthood.  That reminds me of a woman I met years ago. She was probably 65 or 70 at the time.

She came into the office at New Image Car Care and told me she thought her car needed an oil change, but she wasn’t sure, and could I help her.  I went outside and checked the mileage then checked the date and mileage on her reminder sticker and told her, yes, her car was ready for an oil change.  

“Can you pull it in for me?” she asked.

I told her I would be happy to, and she could just have a chair in the office.  After I pulled in the car, I returned to the office.  She told me her husband had recently passed away, and he had done everything for her, and she was having to learn to do things for herself.  When her car was finished and she was ready to go, she wanted to write a check, but she didn’t know how to do that, and she asked if I could write the check for her.

“It’s not hard,” I said, “Let me show you.”

She followed my instructions and handed me the check.  She was beaming.  

“I knew you could do it,” I said.

She was as proud of herself as Sabria was of herself at the Walmart checkout scanner.  When she left our shop, her adult skin costume fit a little better.  

I’ve always believed in giving children a chance to do things for themselves, no matter what their age.  Adulthood is a baton that needs to be passed to the next generation, one fried egg, one clean dish and one written check at a time.

 
Tags: 


Bookmark and Share

Advertisements