and Words
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
On an especially vivid childhood memory of my dad, we built Legos. My kid sister, dad, and I sat on the cold tile floor late at night. Some bricks were scattered over the floor, though most remained in a bucket-like bin used for storage. We built tall, colorful, symmetrical structures that resembled nothing in real-life. It was long past our bedtime, and we struggled to stay awake. My dad ran a restaurant; we didn’t get his uninterrupted time until after closing time. These slivers of time oozed with anticipation and magic.
My older sister, four years my senior, did not join us in our brick-building activity. I’m not sure if she felt she outgrew it, or perhaps it just wasn’t her thing. She approached teen hood at the time, and maybe it was time for her to develop her independence. The one observation about my younger sister and I, we both went on to become engineers. We graduated on the same day, years later; she with a mechanical engineering degree and me with a computer engineering degree.