Everything These Days Is Either "Too Big" or "Go, Go, Sucker!"...

My mum is one of those ladies who goes to church every morning. 

Now she's not one of those church ladies who wears black all the time and mutters with a rosary in her hand.  But she can't rightly start her day without churching it up a little.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend one of her morning masses with her and oddly enough it reminded me of how old I'm getting.  This might seem weird, since I was probably very safely under half of the average age in the building.

But allow me to walk you through the thought process:

The morning mass is very low budget.  There's no instruments and no choir.  So the only source of music is the voices of the twenty-some retired people in the mass.  As they sing, I'm reminded of people twanging saws and shaking gravel in tin cans.  I think of what a great run some of those people must have had with cigarettes.  Then I think of how twanging saws was such a phenomena back in the 80's and how it's totally died now.  They were all over; sitting in chairs with one end of the saw between their knees, hammering on the steel with their hammers and playing tunes.  Showing up on "That's Incredible!" because, well, that's incredible after all.  Then I think of That's Incredible!, how we used to sit on the carpet and watch guys shove 36 cigarettes in their pie-holes while simultaneously making a bee-beard and spinning plates.  Maybe a little chainsaw juggling for good measure.  And we would sit there slack-jawed and amazed and try to jam pencils in our mouths, because obviously at the age of 10 we counted ourselves blessed to get our hands on one smoke, let alone 36.  And I thought of that sense of amazement, which gradually lessened as time went by, until it comes to the day where we watch Blaine hang upside down and the first thought that comes to mind is, "What a loser.  Go get a real job, pretty boy."

And the lack of amazement makes me feel old.

But then later that day, the kid looks at decent sized rock in a parking lot and says, "Wow.  Too big."  And it brings just a little touch of it back.