Cancer sentimentality

To start, let me just say that Cancer is in relation to my birthsign, lest there be any confusion. Disclaimer complete.

It's odd to me how things just pop into my head, in ways that tug at my that odd nostalgic place in me. For some reason lately, the song Puff the Magic Dragon has been on my mind a lot. God only knows why! Now I admit, I'm freakish and odd, and sometimes I don't understand Life and The World In Which We Live... I feel like there's some cosmic Book that everyone else got an memorized and lives by that I never got. I spend a great deal of my life clueless. Not like "dumb blonde" clueless, but deeply, ineffibly, irreparably in the dark. But I digress ("Goodness child, I was raveling a thread," I believe is a close approximation of a line from one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird).

Back to Puff.

So I had the chorus running through my mind ad infinitum. Literally the last thing I would think before I feel asleep, and the first coherant thought I would have upon waking. So I googled the lyrics:

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee,
Little jackie paper loved that rascal puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on puffs gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow wheneer they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flag when puff roared out his name

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave.

The lyrics still strike an odd chord in me: a very Peter Pan-esque desire to never grow up because I don't want to lose all things ethereal and imaginative. While I am totally looking forward to turning 40 in a couple of years, I don't want the expectation that, at 40, I'll have my shit together, be responsible to a fault, eschew all things imaginary, and no longer want to play.
I'm glad to be where I am in my life, but I don't want my Puff to lose his brilliant green scales; I want him to continue to play along the lane; I don't want him to disappear into his cave.

I feel like I need to end with some witty comment or strong point. I don't really have one, except to say that 40 will Be for me what 40 Is for me, just as 37 Is for me right now, and what every other age I've been has Been for me--it is what I make it, how I want it to be, and I'll continue to be happy in my sentimental, youthful, imaginative ignorance.