Be Afraid

I'm guessing I'm not alone in this, but when I was in my early to mid teens, there was nothing in the world more frightening than a group of pretty girls, walking together and talking very loud and very fast. Though I was, like most boys that age, completely stupid about almost everything, I knew this was something that I was attracted to but could not approach. I didn't need to be told that girls mature faster than boys. I could see it and feel it.

I'll be perfectly honest here and tell you that, even though I have teenage girls of my own and work with teenagers, I still refer to these groups as "scary teenage girls." I'm not in any way afraid of them and would be perfectly comfortable walking up and talking to them if I knew one of them. But somewhere there's still a part of me that remembers being 13 and scared to death.

This has been a long introduction to a short observation. I was at Starbucks this afternoon and as I came out I could hear the sound of one of these groups. Again, I'm around kids all day long, so it's not hard to recognize. But I looked over and these girls could not have been older than 11. But they were wearing makeup and jewelry and cool clothes and talking a mile a minute and they were like a miniature version of the real thing. And I thought, man, I thought it was scary when I was a kid, I have great sympathy in advance for the preteen male of the species.