Words by Sam Eldredge
Image by Blaine Eldredge

I’ve been tending to my inner 8-year-old recently. The holiday season brings him to the surface year after year, but for the most part I ignore him or push him down under a blanket of distraction, sugar, and alcohol. He gets me into trouble and makes me feel vulnerable and stupid, so I’d prefer if he not be so vocal. Beer is great for shutting his voice down. For a while.

When I say that I have an inner 8-year-old, I mean it just like it sounds: the past me, the me that I was when I was 8, is still a part of me in a very real sense. He feels distinct from my 30-year-old current self because he tends to have different desires and asks for things that feel silly or stupid or impossible to the current me. For example, this year he asked if we could get Chinese food.

Now for some context, I don’t really eat Chinese food. The last time I did was at some hoity-toity place in Chicago that was trying to prove how fancy dim sum can be, and they were succeeding, I might add. But here in my hometown of Colorado Springs, the Chinese joints in town all look the same and aren’t nearly as fancy as that. So when I was casually going through my day a week before Thanksgiving and the desire for Chinese food came up, it took me off guard.

The holidays tend to do this to me. I find myself wanting moments that may not really exist, days and weeks of rest and sleeping in and rich food and no homework and uh-oh I’m 30, why do I want a break from homework? I often feel disenchanted during the holiday season, and only in hindsight do I realize what I was wanting.

Back to the Chinese food. I’ve been learning, slowly, really slowly, to listen to those desires and ask where they are coming from, in the hope of not experiencing the same disappointment and the same need to quiet and medicate those places. So when I felt the desire for Chinese food, instead of jumping to, “What a stupid idea. You’ll feel sick. You don’t even really like that anymore ...” I asked myself, “Why?”

And what I heard surprised me: I want Sien Sien with the Chinese calendar as placemats on the table, hot and sour soup, and chicken lo mein. 

Oh. This would be when I clued in to the age of those desires inside. Sien Sien was the name of the Chinese restaurant we would go to as a family every once in a while when I was that age, and it was the spot we always got takeout from for Christmas Eve dinner. Those dishes? Exactly what I would have ordered when I was 8.

I felt at once stupid and foolish for voicing those desires because Sien Sien has been closed for 20 years.

But this year I tried a different follow up. Rather than medicating or distracting, I told that desire, “We’ll go find some Chinese food, and I’ll order those things. It won’t be Sien Sien, but that’s okay.” After making the decision, I invited a few others to join me for lunch, and told them that I’d be tending to an inner 8-year-old, that the food wasn’t the point and might not be very good, but that they were welcome to join me if they wanted to. It was a highly unusual lunch invitation, but folks responded with curiosity and tenderness.

We found a nearby spot that offered chicken lo mein, and when we walked in it was like stepping back in time to Sien Sien. The Chinese calendar was used as placemats on the table. Hot and sour soup came with the meal and was the same as I remembered it, I mean the exact same. It was more than I could have hoped for.

Before we’d left for lunch, I had walked to the back of my work and sat on a table in the sun. My decision to say “yes” to the desire was enough, regardless of what the experience of the food was like. Tears came, and once again I was surprised because they felt like 8-year-old Sam’s tears. And I heard him say: “Really? You are going to take care of me? The things that I loved could actually come again?”

Yes, little guy. Yes they could.