My family didn’t really do fun.
    Growing up, there were no season tickets, no airplane rides, no hotel stays, and no concerts or theater. We didn’t go camping all the time, like our neighbors. We never went on vacation to Mexico or Hawaii, like my school friends. We didn’t have off-road motorcycles, a different size for every member of the family, like my cousins.  Once a year, we drove to Disneyland for the day. That’s about it.
    The message seemed to be, “Fun is for other people, not us. We’re different.”
    Part of it was that we didn’t have a lot of money. My father worked a low-level government job, and providing for five children and a housewife in an upper-middle-class, Southern California suburb was a stretch.
    But, also, we were different.
    I was the youngest by far, six years younger than the next, so my parents were older than most of my peers’ parents. They had a tired, burdened, been-there-done-that kind of air, even though they hadn’t been much of anywhere or done much of anything, unless you counted a few years in the 50’s when Dad was at sea in the Navy and Mom was a junior secretary in the Army.
    I didn’t count that.
    Other people, in other families, seemed able to make everyday events creative and enjoyable, but that was too much trouble for us. We were just trying to get through it. We went through the motions of family dinners, holiday gatherings, and road trips to visit family, but our eye contact was wary, our smiles hollow, and our futures grey.
    Luckily, 70’s television provided glimpses of a brighter world—a world where people flew to fantasy islands, took amorous cruises, and solved mysteries while wearing diamonds. A world where people constantly and fearlessly cracked jokes at taxi-dispatching bosses, remedial teachers, and superior officers. A world where you could move to the big city, and you might just make it after all.
    I knew television wasn’t real, but hope beamed in through my bleary little eyes—hope that there were lives very different from my zombie parents and aimless, anxious siblings—lives of full-spectrum technicolor, lives of courage and adventure, lives of fun. Lives that felt like living, not dying.
    I wanted to live.
    However, I was a kid with no money, no autonomy, and few real-world inspirations. People leading fun, adventurous lives weren’t really hanging out in suburbia. Some of my teachers had been to Europe and gave slide shows of overexposed photos on the first day of school each year. That was about it.
    At one point, I noticed that those same teachers kept souvenirs on their desks—little wooden shoes or foreign flags or Eiffel Towers. Those worthless trinkets seemed priceless to me in that they proved their owners knew how to live.
    I desperately wanted to be one of their people, and I decided souvenirs were the ticket. Souvenirs were the keys to the clubhouse. I didn’t have the power to apply for a passport, but I could, within my little world, collect souvenirs.
    Unfortunately, opportunities were infrequent. We didn’t stray from the routine much. I kept my eyes peeled, but even at restaurants, drink umbrellas and crab bibs went to other peoples’ tables, not ours. In ice cream parlors, employees clapped and carried in big sundaes, sparklers, toys, and fake straw hats for other kids. At the local intramural ball field where my brother played, other families showed off big foam fingers or pennants from their stadium visits. We had none.
    On the annual Disneyland trip, New Orleans Square was piled high with perfect, antique-like treasures—souvenirs that would scream my suitability for fun & adventure to anyone who inquired—but they were beyond what my little coin purse savings could afford.
    I conducted the operation gracelessly, whining and sick with wanting all the time. It wasn’t fun for anyone, especially my poor mother, but slowly, I pulled together a shifting stash of flattened pennies, promotional pens, keychains, costume jewelry, cracker-jack toys, and other ephemera.
    Its container and contents were always in flux, because no matter what, I couldn’t seem to get it right. Something in the collection was always too big or too small, or there was too much wood or metal, or the palette was off, or the count. The objects refused to resonate into the tonic chord I sought.
    Each time a schoolmate returned from vacation with a set of shiny, faux-gold wings given personally by the captain of their airplane, I could hardly breathe. I felt desiccated, dying of thirst. If only I could get wings like those, I believed, my collection would finally work. I would be saved.
    But it never happened.
    The truth about souvenirs—that they’re symbolic possessions, meaningful only as reminders of actual, fondly held memories—was completely lost to me, and the ongoing mission failure caused me frustration and despair on an existential scale.  
     It was painful, but at least I had Captain Hawkeye Pierce. He, too, knew existential pain and, nonetheless, had to make the best of it.
     Eventually, I grew up, and I grew to understand that maintaining a spirit of adventure is no small task in the face of adult realities. Groundwork for grand-scale fun has to be laid mindfully, efficiently, and well in advance while also juggling the taxing demands of the workaday world. I can’t hold it against my parents that they didn’t pursue it. Their indifference inspired my dauntlessness.
     I never acquired the faux-gold wings, but I figured out how to fly. I acquired a paycheck, a passport, and an airline mileage account, and I use them to take off as often as possible.
     In the course of being a fun, adventurous person—at least semi-annually—I’ve been relieved of needing to prove it. I don’t collect souvenirs anymore, unless you count stories.
     I love collecting stories—stories of me, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane; me, riding a dogsled in Alaska; me, ziplining through a cloud forest; me, walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival; and me, feeding orphaned monkeys at an animal sanctuary in East Africa.
     Colorful, fun, adventurous stories.
     And those, I do count.