the grown-ups.

A group of six twenty-somethings is sitting around a round table with a white candle centerpiece, eating butter mints at a wedding reception for another twenty-something. One of us is still in school, one semester away from a college diploma, while the rest of us know life on the other side. We have real jobs with regular hours and holidays off and insurance, four teachers and one software engineer. But we are still the same as we were five or ten years ago: she still makes those goofy jokes and the other one still dances in her seat to the music and I still do things like throw butter mints into the ample cleavage of the girl across from me. We are old, but we are not the grown-ups.

One of us is telling a story, a P.E. teacher. He has to teach sex education to the kids. We all remember those days nearly a decade ago when we were submitted to discussing gonads and chlamydia and various fluids with our peers and a stern teacher who glared at anyone who dared to giggle. But having to teach it? What a nightmare. He is talking about how he frequently has to have the students read the material aloud, no doubt embarrassing them as they stumble over unfamiliar terms to describe the same things as the slang terms they use in the locker rooms. Meanwhile, he hides his face behind his own book, shaking with his own trapped giggles. He specifically makes the kids read the book to the class, because he himself knows that he will never be able to make it through without bursting into laughter. We all laugh, thrilled to see a new generation of adolescents going through the hell of learning about the birds, the bees, and the clap.

Then I realize that our own teachers must have felt like this as well, that they must have gone out with their friends and told great stories about the kid who had to stand up and blushingly describe nocturnal emissions. They laughed at the subject matter and they laughed at our discomfort, too. They told immature jokes to their friends. They might have even thrown butter mints at each other's cleavage. We are the grown-ups, and God help us all.