My uncle always said that there are two kinds of people in this world: the people who hand out brochures and the people who don’t.  I always thought he was a little crazy, anyway.

My aunt explains it like this: what my uncle really meant was that there are people who practically hand out pamphlets about who they’re not or who they wish they were, and people who are fine with being who they are where they are and don’t feel like changing it.  I think she was just trying to justify something and my uncle actually didn’t have a philosophical bone in his body.  My aunt argues that it isn’t technically philosophy, dear.  I tell her to shut up, dear.

I figure that my life probably falls into two categories, just like people in this world supposedly do.  You could call these categories ages.  There is one age, the age of innocence, and the second age, the age of maturity (because we like to follow patterns here).  You could also refer to the age of maturity as the age of defeat--whatever floats your boat.  I personally like the “age of defeat” better because it puts more of a dramatic spin on it and emphasizes the fact that it is most definitely not the preferable of the two.

Now, I’m not quite sure when The Age of Innocence began; I’m filing an official report on it in my brain, and I need all the information I can get.  I know when it started, at least--it started at the very depths of my memory and below, in the dark abyss that holds only the emotions of the beginning of me, the dark abyss that shaped my life into what it is now and required the purchase of all those parenting books by my parents and the subsequent inflation of the stock market for Parenting Daily and Parenting Weekly and Parenting Monthly and Parenting Yearly and Parenting Bi-Annually (supposedly for divorced families, I guess?) and Discovering Your Child While He/She Is Hiding and Diving Into the Toddler Years With Water Wings and Taking Your Child To School In a Car and Passing the Teenage Years With Flying Colors and Walls That Do Not Have Holes in Them and all sorts of other stuff that you can imagine.  So, that’s where it all started...useless commercial literature.  But is that where it ended, too?  Did the age of innocence end with literature?  Brochures, possibly?  Or did the age of innocence end with the oxymoron of making it through the pure, chaste, you could almost call them holy teenage years with unholy walls?

Or did the age of innocence end in the beginning of defeat, when the sour taste of victory was no longer on my tongue but rather in the back of my throat?  Did the age of innocence end when the horror of public schools and PG-13 movies began?  When I finally acclimated to vulgar language and uncensored discussion?  Did the age of innocence end when caution began in the family and the school and the private life, when the need was there for a class to teach me the path of teenage virtue consisting of information on the problems specifically faced by my age group and included opposing genders? 

Or does the age of innocence still live within me?  Is it that I, no matter how long I live, can stay within my own protected world of the age of innocence that I preserve for myself, without societal and cultural interference?  Is it possible? Is it?...I suppose I'll just have to find out...