play doh, mistakes and sand castles

The best way I can describe the Turks & Caicos beaches is to compare the ocean to blue kool aid and the sand to flour (in both texture and color). These edible analogies inevitably led me to thoughts of food and I wondered if there was cookie recipe that called for flour and kool aid. Perhaps such a recipe would allow me to re-live and savor my vacation on a very small scale. When I plugged the two ingredients into google, my first result was a play doh recipe. Remember play doh? The smell of it? The way it would crumble after sufficient air exposure and solidify in tiny pieces on and in between the carpet fibers…?

…but you weren’t allowed to play with play doh near the carpet, were you?

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There were a lot of things you weren’t supposed to do when you were little.

You weren’t supposed to treat your brother like a science project. Physically speaking, feeding him your mom’s poinsettias (highly poisonous) or the Reeses Pieces (he is allergic to nuts). Psychologically speaking, seeing if he would believe in either the friendly monster that travelled through your home’s plumbing system or stuffed animal dogs that talked (he believed in both). Nor were you supposed to promote him to your personal assistant delegating the “hard” questions for the supervising adults to him. Perhaps more importantly, you weren’t allowed to sell your gently used toys to him.

You weren’t supposed to write on the walls… even if it was a nice message… in pencil…on the bottom of the wall. For instance, “I love you Mom and Dad.”

You weren’t supposed to unzip the bean bag chairs with your next-door neighbor and dump all the beans on the basement floor; nor were you allowed to let her cut your hair.

You weren’t allowed to take off your sweater at the school dance if you were wearing a spaghetti strap shirt.

You weren’t allowed to pet the kitty’s eyes.

But you did all of this anyway.

We all broke the rules when we were little and we still do now. The difference is that when we were younger, we knew the moment we broke a rule: it was a matter of right and wrong, black and white. We felt ashamed, rebellious, empowered, embarrassed.

As I grow older, the rules change and become less and less clear. Perhaps this is because, for the most part, I alone hold myself accountable for following the rules. Maybe I allow some of the lines to become blurry and grey, or maybe I drew them that way. In the end, the consequence of a broken rule is the same: it is that fallen piece of play doh that permanently settled in between the carpet fibers; a lasting reminder of where we weren’t supposed to be. Like our transgressions, these pieces vary by size, but stay with us forever.

So, what do we do? We make resolutions, we promise we won’t repeat our mistakes, we vow to be better people. We gain perspective. We learn from our mistakes.

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Playing in the sand in Turks and Caicos reminded me of how quickly things can change: one minute you have a castle, the next minute – it’s gone and your feet have disappeared. No matter how sophisticated your sculpture is, it will be gone the next morning. But by the same token, all the things that seemed unbearable today will look different tomorrow morning. The ocean never fails to remind me of how small we all are… what a little part of the world we each represent. Nevertheless, I still believe it’s important to learn from my mistakes, to do the best I can and to hold myself to a certain standard – the rules I believe in – even if others don’t…

…or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s smarter to drink the kool-aid and believe that everything will work itself out and everyone will get what they deserve in the end (right, Lindsay?)