�����Whoever wrote that Tom Hanks movie "Big" really got it, you know? That's how it feels when you get older. The outside packaging looks all grown up and stuff, but the person inside ... nuh UH. Sometimes the outside and the inside can be way, way out of sync.

�����Hey, don't get me wrong, there's lots of cool stuff about getting older--they give you a VISA card, you can have a car, AND you can cross the street all by yourself, without a grown-up's help. Lots of cool stuff.

�����But there is a downside here. You're kind of expected to act as mature as you look. Yeah. Really. I know. So, say you feel like grabbing a plastic pail and a shovel and going outside to play in the dirt ... well, there seems to be a rule against that for people of my august years.

�����I've found a way around this, though. It's called gardening. I get to play in the dirt as much as I want as long as I leave my pail and bucket in the toy box and use a shovel and wheelbarrow instead. Aren't I the cunning one, eh?

�����See, I was never one of those girlie girls, all ribbons, bows and dollies. Never. I always wanted to play outside in the dirt with the guys, do dinky cars, stuff like that. Ooooh, Dinky Toys. Did you ever have those? Those teensy tiny little perfect metal vehicles? Oh God, how I lusted after those things.

�����They were minature marvels that fit easily into the palm of my hand. Lots of them had doors and trunks that opened, the details they put into them were wonderful. And they were incredibly well made, very heavy metal.

����Pitch one of those at someone you were ticked off at, and Mr. Man, you could put someone's eye out. Not like today's flimsy toys ... heck, you've really got to work to maim someone with a toy today. Ah, the good old days.

�����Anyways, my parents ignored my pleas for those toys and kept giving me girlie things like dolls, tea sets and similar crapolla until my eighth birthday.

�����Ah, yes, my eighth birthday, the year they gave me a hideously expensive doll carriage. It did everything a real baby carriage would do, including collapse flat. Hmmmmm. Didn't take me long to see the possibilities in that.

�����So I cut everything off the frame with my mom's kitchen scissors and all I had left was this cool collapsible chrome frame. I dropped it down flat, lined the bottom with smushed flat cardboard boxes, and voil� my very own go cart. Vroom vroom. I got the spanking of my life for that stunt, but my parents got the message. Sort of. Maybe.

�����They stopped giving me dolly type stuff, but they wouldn't give me Dinky cars or anything similarly cool, either. So I ended up in the no man's land of science kits, pet fish, and books for my birthdays. It could have been worse, I guess. I never did get cursed with a Barbie.

�����Anyhow, now that I'm grown up ... sort of ... well maybe what I should say here is that now that I'm way older, I still really enjoy playing in the dirt.

�����Tell people that you're gardening, and heck, that Grown-Ups Aren't Allowed To Play In The Dirt Rule gets waived. I'm not kidding. It's true. They'll let you play in the dirt as long as you want, get as muddy as you want. Keen, huh?

�����I suppose I could have been practical about this, you know, grown vegetables or something like that. (Marn pauses, considers the notion for a few nanoseconds, discards it quickly.) Nah, practical is out of the question here. This is play.

�����I grow the most frivolous thing you can grow, flowers. I grow them in mass quantities. Nope, nothing practical at all happening here. And not only that, but to do it I've gotta practice extreme gardening. None of that "woman in a straw-hat and tasteful flower print dress carrying a wicker basket, snipping roses business" for me. Sheesh. How feeble.

�����Honey, when I garden, we're talking about D-9 'dozers moving rocks the size of small Japanese cars, chainsaws, back hoes wrenching out tree roots, and four wheel drive tractors moving front end loaders full of stones. If opening a flower bed does not involve diesel engines, then you are NOT, I repeat, NOT an extreme gardener.

�����But then, like extreme sports of any kind, extreme gardening involves a certain amount of reckless stupidity.

�����I mean, I simply cannot grok WHY someone would hurtle down a narrow mountain track studded with roots and rocks on a dirt bike. Extreme biking? Hellllooooo, it looks like an extreme death wish to me.

�����But then WHY would anyone throw the kind of time, sweat and money into flowers that I do, especially in my climate, when at best I'm going to see them for maybe four months? Hmmmm, looks like extreme stupidity to me.

�����Oh well, no news there, eh?

�����So, to sum up, (I know, I know, it's about time I did this) no matter how old you are, you can keep playing in the dirt as long as you say you are gardening.

�����AND, as if that wasn't insight enough, (giving, I'm always giving) I have proven to you yet again that although I'm aging, I have clung tenaciously to all my original quota of God given stupidity. It strikes me that I may have actually augmented it some, but hey, I'm not one to brag, eh.

�����This brings us to point number two. See, you DON'T have to get older and wiser. You can be like me and just get older, it's much, much simpler.

�����Thank you, thank you very much. You may hold your applause until the end of my diary.