Childish things

“Pinocchio” is one heck of a good Disney movie. I know because I sat down to watch it just recently, the grease from a giant bowl of popcorn dribbling from one corner of my mouth. There were no children present, no wide-eyed squeals of delight as the titular character became a real boy. Just me. This is what it’s come to: Watching kids’ films alone and eating myself into a nostalgia-tinged stupor.

Some people might consider this a low of sorts, the act of a depressed man, but I knew better. The way I see it -- or at least the way I’ve rationalized it to myself -- is that I’m simply a guy who’s retained a sense of what made his childhood fun and memorable. The movie brought me comfort when I was a boy, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t bring me some comfort now. It’s a blankie I can cling to while I contentedly suck my thumb.

What’s remarkable is the lack of shame or embarrassment I feel in admitting this. Part of this is personality; I don’t particularly care what people think of me. If I did, I wouldn’t wear Megadeth t-shirts to the supermarket and fart brazenly in front of my mother.

Partly, though, I’m emboldened by a certain trend gaining traction among people of my generation. See, it used to be fashionable to act all grown-up and mature. What’s that line from the Bible? The one about becoming an adult and leaving childish things behind? That used to be the overriding philosophy of anyone on the downslope of adolescence. For men of generations past in particular, it was expected that once you hit a certain age, you put your boyhood obsessions aside, strapped on a tie and stoically went about your grown-up life, dutifully coveting grown-up things like lawnmowers and ratchet sets. Do ratchets come in sets? I don’t even know.

Today we live in a world in which nobody grows up, or has to. Twenty- and thirtysomethings have the same responsibilities, of course. We go to work and bring home the bacon, and sometimes we cash that in for literal bacon, which in turn gives us a very adult case of heart disease. We pay our bills and have homes and families, and occasionally we’ll even go and buy some ratchets, which Google assures me do indeed come in sets. We trudge through life and meet its demands. We keep our farts to ourselves.

But we also sleep on Iron Man bedsheets. We watch cartoons and eat cereal for dinner and proudly adorn our mantles with collectible Justice League action figures. The new adulthood is a strange amalgam of past and present, our pacifiers still clutched tight into our later decades. My grandfather, who passed away last year, would likely have been very confused to discover that the dominant piece of art in my living room is a giant poster of Batman.

He may have chalked it all up to proof of generational degradation. Yet I’m not so convinced it’s entirely a bad thing.

Being a nerd, I was reading a 2010 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science which claimed that our core personalities, the set of traits that make us us, are set for life by the time we’re in 1st grade. That means we are who we are, more or less, when we reach the age of 8 or 9. Tender years, those. When I was 9 I was shy and tentative and enjoyed solitude, all characteristics that have survived to the present day. I can’t shed these things. They’re embedded in me, the way your brashness is embedded in you, and the proclivity for laughing at pies in the face is embedded in your uncle Mortimer. (The one with the hook nose who everyone avoids at parties. You know the guy.) Nobody would ask us to jettison our personalities when we grew up, and we couldn’t if we tried.

Yet we’re expected to jettison everything else we liked when we were 9. If grandfathers ruled the world, I’d be forced to scrap all my Ninja Turtles video games, toss my New Kids on the Block tapes and burn a giant pile of X-Men comics. They would be replaced, respectively, with computer solitaire, big band records and the collected works of Charles Dickens. Those are all good things, but when do I get to drop the seriousness and read junk and watch trash? The mind needs a good palate cleanser now and then, and few things are better for that sort of thing than the stories and characters that appealed to us in our formative years -- back when our idea of a balanced diet was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and birthday cake. Occasional frivolity is healthy.

Not everything survives from those early years, of course, and not everything should. Long gone are the sippy cups and belching contests. The scooter is ancient history. The glitter pens are too, and none too soon. But a lot of those core interests, the Disney flicks and collectible figurines and whatnot, are pretty foundational; letting go of these childish things would seem like some sort of betrayal, a repudiation of my younger self. And I think a lot of Gen Xers and older Millennials feel the same way. Every adult knows life is hard, and every adult deals with it in his or her own way. Ours is to cling fast to the things that brought us comfort, because they’ve never stopped bringing us comfort, and that’s OK. If that makes us nerds, well, that’s OK too. At least we’re nerds with some sort of orientation, a compass in labyrinthine times. More people could use that, frankly.

Which is why, on a random Wednesday night in August, I sat below a Batman poster and watched “Pinocchio” for the first time in 30 years. It felt good. In fact, in another 30 years, I just might do it again.