A Shortcut Through The Woods

There are at least two ways to get home if you are a kid. The grownups' way (down the street, up the sidewalk) or the best way (through the woods, around someone's backyard, across a brook, or whatever way is the shortest). That's why, when parents rang their respective "supper is ready" bells, you never saw any kids going home on the street. Why take the long way?

Guess I'm still a kid. If I'm at one point, coming back to my house, I take the street; if at another, then it's "where did he go and how did he get here" time. Up through a company's parking lot, then cut between some cars, go up a slight hill, across where someone's garage used to be, cut through a small wooded area (well, where it used to be before I cut out some wild-growing foliage), up an embankment and through another parking lot. A lot quicker than going down one street and up another.

People tell me to act my age. I see people acting my age and they are stuck in their ways, starting to act a bit grumpy, awfully worried about how they come across. When you start getting older, you approach the age when you can tell people to * themselves. You've spent years playing the game, dressing according to other people's standards; now you can bloom. As my mother once said, when asked why she didn't dye her hair, "I'm a gray-haired old lady and that's how I like it."

If anyone reading this is around when they carry me out, tell the pallbearers secretly to veer off and take a shortcut through the woods. Yeah, you'll startle a lot of people, but my friends will understand.