flashquake (Click on the photos to enlarge them.) |
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The Kid Inside |
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When my parents were alive, I resented their inability to see me as the adult I thought I had become. Parents with thirty years on their children can't ever really meet them as equals. So in the first years after Mom and Dad died, I finished growing up. Soon I learned being an adult wasn't all I had imagined it to be. The grownup role, all the time, was deadly dull and I found myself wanting to do a seance for the kid I had eagerly buried. The urbane, sophisticated adult is curious. The kid inside is downright nosy. Confronted with the unfamiliar the adult is cautious, methodical, temperate, logical and analytical. The kid inside is spontaneous, excitable, insatiable, abstract and very much in the moment. When I went to Prague for the first time, I took the kid inside with me. The airline accommodated but they didn't know they were giving me a twofer. On the surface, I looked like a "normal" person. Prague was more prepared than most cities to accommodate the interests of both the curious adult and the nosy kid. It's old. No. It's very old, centuries and centuries old. It's historic, and it's pretty much intact. It wasn't bombed in World War II because Hitler met minimal resistance from the Czech people. Then the Communists ruled until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The streets are still cobblestoned. The facades of Communist-neglected buildings have been cleaned and restored. Prague's economy has refocused on tourism. For the curious adult there was much history to unravel. For the nosy kid, Prague was mesmerizing. The picture buildings or two-toned stucco facades scattered through the city demanded inspection at close range. They needed to be touched. "How do they do that?" a small voice echoed in my head. There was a toy museum inside Prague Castle. Street vendors and shops displayed a large array of marionettes and cleverly designed wooden toys. And marionette theaters all over the city offered puppet shows ranging from "Yellow Submarine" to the Mozart opera, "Don Giovanni." Because I traveled with the kid inside, this situation required negotiation. The adult won, or thought he did, and purchased a ticket for the opera. The music was a recording done by a world-renowned opera company, so the voices were topnotch. Performed in the original Italian, with a short synopsis printed in a smorgasbord of languages, logic suggested an adult evening. But marionette companies know their niche. The guest conductor was Mozart himself. He wore a pink waistcoat and a black hair ribbon that tied a mane of silvery hair into a neat ponytail at the back. The laid back Wolfgang, enjoyed a bottle of bubbly. The drunker he got, the more relaxed and comedic the baton action became. The puppet troupe hammed its way through the score as if they were enjoying their champagne in the wings. By intermission the kid inside had completely taken possession of the evening. There's an old adage that says that children who make it through the intolerant teen years are astounded at how much smarter their parents have become. But, who would have thought that parents could continue to gain wisdom even seven and eleven years after their deaths? |
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