Happy Birthday, Zexiv!

Zexiv has always been fascinated with the story of this boy who never wanted to grow up and never did. He remembers his mother sewing him a very good likeness of a Peter Pan costume one Halloween (it might have been the same year Inverbras went as a pirate and Grasshopper went as a crepe paper flower whose colors ran when it started to rain). Later on the same costume was handed down 2 or 3 years later to Middle sister. He thought nothing ever came close or as magical to the original Walt Disney cartoon. He thought the movie Hook was silly as far as remakes go but did like the movie version that came out perhaps 2 or 3 years ago, the one that was produced by Dodi Al Fayed's father.

You know you're definitely older when you can't seem to take the taste of rum and coke anymore, or watch television lying on your stomach the whole time like you see your little nephews and nieces doing without getting a neckache or even freely break into a run whenever you feel like it.

On the other hand, while it would nice to have the carefree, secure, and simple life of a kid again, Zexiv says he wouldn't want to go through ALL of it - school, restrictions, bullies, rejections, and all that. As one of the characters in the movie "Big" told Tom Hanks, when he asked her to become a kid like him"It was hard enough the first time".

I asked Zexiv what his oldest childhood recollections were and he came up with a few:

1. Standing in a corner crying one evening in his grandfather's house and his father coming home - this was before the family had moved into a house of their own - and his father asking "what his problem was". And Zexiv not knowing what the word "problem" meant but thinking it sounded like the sound made when you knocked on one of the hollow walls of the house ...

2. His mother telling him when he was 4 years old in the kitchen table that he was too old to be using a teaspoon for eating meals and that from then on, he would be using a tablespoon, and Zexiv feeling really bad about that ...

3. Insisting on going to the beach in Dagupan when it was raining and his Opa driving him and the other grandkids in his big Chevy Impala and the car slipping on the bridge and hitting the side, and Zexiv being terrified the car would go over into the river ...

4. Looking at their new house a month or two before the family moved in, going into his soon-to-be room and looking out the window, and hearing someone go "psst!", but not seeing anyone ... he still wonders to this day if it was some ghost or evil spirit or perhaps some mischievious helper from the neighbor's house playing tricks on him ...

5. On his first day of school, making his first friend by asking his seatmate in class if he was "a car rider or bus (as in school bus) rider" (years later he would encounter the same former schoolmate, now an apparently very important stuffed shirt, on his first day at a job in a bank who would ignore him completely).

Zexiv finds it amazing he can remember all these things and not remember things like whether he locked the door to his front door or not ...

Happy Birthday old pal, from all of us here at Camp Grayloft!!!