Sometimes I Do Grown-Up Things

Last week, I had the pleasure of having lunch as a full-fledged adult with an old friend from high school that I hadn’t seen in a few years. He’s also a fellow blogger and you should check out his amazing and inspiring work: Keep It Up, David. He already blogged about our encounter, so I’ll try to avoid treading the same ground. Suffice it to say, opportunities to act like a legitimate adult, such as eating in a restaurant without a high chair or a booster seat or a squirming child are increasingly rare and quite welcome when they come along. 


I did however notice that I spent a good deal of time at said lunch talking about the Doozer. Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. Being a dad is now part and parcel of my entire existence. It is not simply another component of my life, it is my life. And so it dominates conversations that don’t need to be about the Doozer at all.

Yet, apparently, I can’t stop talking about him.

It has slipped my mind whether my friend David made inquiries about the Doozer, or whether I just injected his presence into our conversation and he simply indulged my tangents, as I droned on and on, steering the conversation further and further from my dining companion’s far-more-interesting exploits working in production on daytime television in Los Angeles. Not to mention everything else that a single person in a big city gets to experience on a daily basis, untethered by a toddler.

But we are of that age, I suppose, where the people that you knew in high school are now living some version of an adult life, often married, frequently with children. At lunch, David mentioned an acquaintance who had a child who may have been as old as eight or ten (he couldn't quite recall). I observed how odd it was to think that all these people are parents. How bizarre, how perfectly strange. "You're one of those people," he said, dryly.

Oh, right. I am one of those people. For about 48 minutes, I'd kind of forgotten. I had an adult conversation with an old friend and it wasn't all about the Doozer. Although, again, I did interject him into the conversation frequently. I guess I don't have that much else to talk about these days. And that, after all, is what the Dad Scene is all about. That's my scene now, that's who I am these days. And I guess it's a pretty good scene to be a part of. Not a bad gig, all in all.

But seriously, I really must find at least a few new conversation topics for adult encounters.