I was playing Hangman with my future six-year-old niece this weekend at a Mexican restaurant as we were waiting for food, and wasn’t just loosing badly; I was getting my ass kicked.

Ten minutes in, I had guessed eight letters, only one of which had made the cut – the letter ‘a.’  I sat there munching on chips and salsa, stupefied.

_ a _

I guessed another three letters to no avail before spitting out the letter ‘y’ in disgust, almost as a protest guess. The six-year old scrawled the letter to the right of the ‘a’ and I stared at the complex verbal arithmetic she had created:

_ a y

“Can I get more salsa?” I asked the waitress, who scurried by. I was stalling. “Maybe some guacamole too? Can you make it by hand? Oh, and I’ll take a triple scoop hot fudge sundae and an old fashioned.”

Thirty seconds passed. I blinked. Pressure was building.

“M-A-Y. It’s MAY!” I barked.

“You won!” the six-year-old shrieked. “You won!”

I looked down at the mess of letters I had incorrectly guessed that she had scribbled next to the hangman. There were 10-12 or so by my estimation, but the large font she used to write them down made it look like I had worked my way through the English and Arabic languages and was now onto Mandarin.

I had very clearly done everything but win. I had guessed so many letters wrongly that the niece may well have layered the hangman in J Crew’s winter line before he suffered his fate. Moreover, the presence of a tiara suggested she was being forced to accessorize to keep the hangman alive. We were one more missed letter away from a pair of UGZ.

My hangman was beyond hung. He suffered a very violent death. Each letter more horrific than the next. Vowels, Consonants. It didn’t matter. They came at him with a flurry and overwhelmed him. Bright red salsa stained the placemat on which his motionless body lay.

But she didn’t see the mess of letters. Well, she did, but they had no bearing on her thought process. I had messed up, but I kept at it, and eventually I succeeded, and to her that was winning.

Yeah, yeah, it’s childhood innocence, I know. But still, I smiled a smile as wide at the salsa bar, joyful that for five, maybe 10 seconds, I was reminded that it is not all about wins, or black, or losses, or white.

We live in the gray for a long time growing up – even throughout our teens. Imaginary friends dance. We use colors that aren’t supposed to go together. We take chances. Bigger ones than we take NOW.

Exhibit A: The note I passed to a girl I liked in sixth grade. That sounds trivial until I count on my fingers the number of years it’s been since I hit on a girl and I run out of hands.

I lament that life becomes black and white as we grow older – metaphorically and literally. We merely win or fail. Promoted or demoted. We furiously type away on our black laptops and clamor away on our black, well Blackberrys. Then we go home and try and inspire ourselves by hanging a new piece of art from Z Galleria, because that is what our playground has been reduced to – a bunch of white walls.

We go from coloring on walls to hanging crappy imitation art on them that we overpaid for. We go from dreaming bigger to working harder. We turn our attention from keg to political parties. It’s inevitable. We grow up. We have babies. They color on walls for us.

I find that sad. You may disagree, saying “That’s the way it has to be Keith.” I don’t know that I would disagree with you. But I certainly wouldn’t agree with you. 

So what have I learned by eating a quesadilla alongside a six-year old?

It has encouraged me to think less about the sum, or the result, or the “right” way. It has encouraged me to believe in what we disbelieve in. It has encouraged me to spend more time with people who are creative, or odd, or ever better yet, weird. Abnormal or what is thought of as wrong is so much more interesting than what we all agree on.

Life lies at the edges.

But mostly, it has taught me that if I want my Hangman to wear a Kangol hat before he dies, then fuck it, he gets to wear a Kangol hat.