A Room With A View

As a child grows older one of the most
rapidly changing places in any house is their bedroom.  It is evolution times one hundred.  Toys that once seemed so appropriate are suddenly as out of place as an Avon Lady in coal mine.  While I understand the parent who went crazy and spent a fortune on the pirate ship bed, I pity them as one year merged into the next.  Suddenly the once magical bed no longer seemed quite appropriate as their child's legs surpassed it's length.

After numerous requests, and having safely left his urges to have a room with the walls painted black in the rear view mirror, I recently succumbed to my sixteen year old's prostrations for an update.  It was an exercise in compromise.  Despite his urging I refused to allow him to forsake his bed frame and place his mattress on the floor.  To him it seemed "cool," to me it seemed representative of either homelessness or my college years.  I did however let him choose the paint and overall theme.  The evolution is still in process but little by little it is beginning to look like a Buddhist forest shrine.  A tree stencil ads a silhouette to green walls.  Art work accentuates the theme and a carved Buddha wall hanging is waiting for the next World Market sale to come home with us.  This is compete with aromatherapy that thankfully has usurped the constantly burning incense.  Presently the smell of lavender has replaced the scent of a Himalayan brothel.   

In the initial stages of renovation my son excavated through piles of toys and books ripe with an air of reflection and contemplation.  Memories clouded his mind and at times he almost had a tear.  You see, suddenly he realized he was growing older.  I remember the same feelings as a child.  Like a curtain descending in a theater dividing perception from reality you feel as if everything is different.  While you like it in a way you are also filled with lament for what once was and never again will be.  I suppose in my own life the fact that my parents moved us to a different house when I was 15 helped create a division between young and not so young.  As adults we have moved through many chapters of our lives and we know what it is like to look back and lament the loss of each one.  Sometimes we lose control and try to go back but it is never quite the same.  Children and grand children give us a chance to revisit our youth yet we are never more than observers peering through a window often blinded by our own reflection of lost innocence.

When you are young growing older is exciting.  As you age growing old is depressing.  We all know that we march toward an inevitable finality yet the world around us continues to be reborn.  The wonderful thing about a room is that the view is always changing.  It might be in the same place or somewhere far away.  A room is a temporary record of our existence, a fragment of our time and space.  I love to sleep in rooms that far surpass my own lifetime.  When I do, I always reflect on the stories that passed through before me and those that will follow me.  In time the Buddhist shrine will give way to something else yet in this beautiful moment, in this beautiful time, it is the home of my beautiful sixteen year old boy.