Man, those kids are Non-Stop

On the Friday before Halloween, I volunteered at the West Side Elementary school dance to complete two and half of my required hours. It was a pretty crazy night. There were so many excited children dressed in costumes and hyped on sugar… It reminded me of the good ole days when I actually enjoyed socializing with other people and Kids Bop wasn’t appalling to the ears.

Let me first address the costumes because they were amazing. There was one little girl who had a full, blow-up dinosaur costume, and everything she did was hilarious. When she ran, the dinosaur head bobbed violently from side to side. When she drank a Sprite, the dinosaur claws were clutching a tiny can of soda. When she went under the limbo, her large dinosaur head tilted 90 degrees and her short arms waved in an annoyed fashion. Honestly, I wish I had been that cool as a kid. To name some of the others, there was a cake, several Star Wars characters (no Star Trek though, darn), and a Wonder Woman whose entire costume was homemade from duct tape.

I worked the concession stand, and it was highly amusing, Kids would buy a can of soda and then twenty minutes later come back for another one. Then they’d buy tons of candy, as if they weren’t 90% sugar already. The pizza sold like mad too. I just don’t understand why every large social gathering must have pizza. How have we not all gotten sick of it? (This is a rant for another time.)

Anyway, it was one of those times where I felt a weird shift in my identity. For so long, I was the kid that had to be supervised, but now I was one of the adults. Kids asked me questions about where to go. One poor kid got hit in the face, so he came to us for ice. It was weird. But it was great to talk to these kids and admire their costumes and let them tell me something about Halloween or their life. They have an insane amount of energy too. They just run and run and run in no discernable pattern for hours for no other reason than that it’s fun. And then their friends join in because why not? And then suddenly everyone’s running ….Except this one little girl who I observed. She was just calmly sitting cross-legged in the middle of the gym. Not upset. Not bothered. Just quietly watching the chaos unfolding around her. She reminded me of myself.

What a Friday night. Handing out lukewarm pizza and cleaning up popcorn spills. But I guess seeing a power ranger and a dinosaur fend off a baseball player who wanted to step on the dinosaur’s tail made it all worth it.