Dumb Kids That We Love Anyway...

Kids do some dumb stuff. Let's just put it out there and be blatantly honest. You and I were both dumb kids ourselves at one point or another, and in those dumb moments, someone more mature was saying, either aloud or in their head "Man, that kid is dumb."

Dumb stuff is jumping from something onto or into something else without fully understanding the number of ways the jump could go bad. Dumb stuff is sticking stuff in your ears, having a tea party with your grandmother's good China, and shoplifting. Other dumb stuff includes sneaking out of your parents' house and setting up pillow dummies without knowing just how badly it will hurt when your dad finds out and pulls your hair in front of all the police set out to find you. You are wondering whether I am speaking about myself, and the answer is, mmm, yea. Some of it is me. Some of it is dumb people I acquaint myself with.

Kids in particular do some pretty dumb stuff. I was destined for dumbness since infancy, and somehow managed to crawl under my neighbors car, at the tender dumb age of 1, and got myself nearly killed. Permanent head scar and one broken arm. Some might blame this on a parent, but I am taking full responsibility since dumb acts tend to seem logical to me on a frequent basis, until I end up in a cast or suffering from head trauma. (Explains a lot).

Several more times in my dumb youth I ended up in emergency care. Running up and down the hallway of our house with an innertube around my waist assuming it would protect me from bumping into the wall. Note to those of you thinking I am so clever: it didn't work. One unconscious little girl surrounded by paramedics and deflated innertube was the end result.

Later my father must have known I was "accident prone", a gentle way of saying "dumb" and forbid me from climbing any trees. So what did his dumb daughter do? Decide that using a leather belt would be a great way to learn how to rappel- first lesson: the tree outside our house.

So one glorious afternoon I got myself geared up and headed for that gorgeous flowering empress tree. I was set. I was gonna' be somebody. First female rappeller to enter the Olympics.

You can likely guess what happened.

One unfortunate leather belt couldn't hold the weight of one very dumb 10 year old. She fell and broke her dumb wrist. The one smart thing she managed to do? Lie and tell her parents she had slipped in the kitchen. It would take 8 years, just after her 18th birthday, to finally confess to her not-so-strict anymore father that she had climbed the forbidden tree. He laughed at my dumbness, and one very big fat lie.

Over time I started to understand that one way of avoiding dumb consequences was to avoid doing dumb stuff, and I wisened up and became slightly smart. There did come the time, however, when I allowed one very dumb niece (who I adore, let's not get it twisted), to convince me to do something rather dumb.

Last April I went to New York for a conference. I decided to bring along my husband and my 17 year-old niece, Ariel, for the trip so that they could enjoy all the wonders of the Big Apple while I was hard at work. Everything went swimmingly, until that last night.

We were riding that tall elevator of one very posh Manhattan hotel. We had had a full week and were tired, perhaps a logical excuse for all sense of logic going out the window. My niece told me how fun it was to jump as high as I possibly could while riding the elevator: "It's a cool feeling". Note to you all: Anytime someone under the age of 25 tells you something is "cool", it will likely end in disaster.

She jumps solo.

Nothin'.

She begs me and Lloyd to partake in this thing that she heard about from a friend of a friend and they all jump on 3.

Jump = THUMP!

Elevator stops. Right there, somewhere between floors 6 and 7. She giggles. I quickly become annoyed.

It would take over 2 hours to finally get the staff to realize we were stuck in the elevator at 1 a.m. Another hour for the firemen to arrive, and another 1/2 hour for these trained professionals to figure out how to get the elevator open.

We nearly missed our flight home and I wasn't all kinds of conversational with her on that trip back. What I can say, with some degree of certainty, is that this had marked one of those monumental moments for my niece when she began to consider that one way to avoid dumb consequences was to avoid doing dumb stuff. I love her... I'm just sayin'...