TheBanyanTree: twilight walk with moon and teen

[Julie Anna Teague]

I had to pry the boy away from the tv and the computer last night and 
make him take a walk with me.  It was for his own good--the kid has 
been almost completely non-moving lately.  It was a glorious, warm 
twilight with a bright gibbous moon, and we hiked down to an area near 
our house which a wonderful older lady sold to the Sycamore Land Trust 
so that no one can ever develop it. (Ha! A finger in the face of 
several bigwig ruiners-of-beautiful-places!)  The short trail opens to 
a rise in a woods surrounded by pines and cedars and covered with 
literally thousands of daffodils.  Just lovely.

The kid was wound up, let me tell you.  Like a spring.  Once he got his
feet moving, got some blood pumping, and realized he had a captive
audience, he was a one man comedy act.  He kept going into these
tirades in different funny voices.  One long, hilarious spiel was about
how I was a bad little booger eater.  Just totally ridiculous and crude
stuff, but done well enough that I was almost rolling on the ground
laughing.

As we were hiking, we came across a huge, dead snapping turtle at the 
side of the road.  It's head was four inches across, and it's shell was 
a foot wide if not a bit more.  I don't know if I've ever seen a 
snapping turtle that big, poor thing.  Andy said, "You know, when we 
were walking up I thought this turtle looked like a pile of elephant 
dung.  Doesn't it look just like elephant dung?  But then I thought to 
myself, 'It must be something else because where would an elephant have 
come from?'"  After I finished laughing till I choked, I thought to 
myself how this was a subtle shift in his thought process.  Just last 
year he would've asked me, in all seriousness, "Is that a pile of 
elephant dung in the road?"  Last year he wouldn't have made the mental 
leap, right away, of realizing there are no elephants in the vicinity.

He also tells me, this sixteen year old of mine, that this is why he 
doesn't need to do drugs--because his brain works in this odd fashion.  
He sees it as "random thinking".  I tend to take the view that he has 
not yet had the endless possibilities of the world squashed out of him 
and proven, for all intents and purposes, impossible.  He postulates 
"elephant dung" and has to remind himself that there are probably no 
elephants roaming around Southern Indiana.  My adult brain has already 
eliminated all possibilities of elephants and rarely even thinks of 
them.  In fact, I see now that I eliminated a lot of impossible
possibilities at far too young an age.

Julie