When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again: they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
I'm not sure exactly when it was that I realized this, but the feeling was very distinct and stuck with me. One random day, something made me realize that the adults in my life were not the all-knowing, super-human people that I always thought they were. I suddenly knew that there would not be a specific time/date when I would become an adult and I became very sad. It is a painful process to grow up and thinking about this only makes me worry more about our campers, who probably came to this realization much earlier in life than I did. I guess knowing the truth is a good thing, but neverthelss, it makes me sad to think about what a shortened childhood some of these kids have.
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