Silly skipping still brings smiles

Pokemon just skipped down our sidewalk.

It’s the night after Halloween, the night when rescheduled trick-or-treating hours have been put on the calendar. Connie and I have been passing out candy for about an hour and a half.

And I find myself thinking about Pokemon skipping down our sidewalk.

It’s not the costume that’s on my mind. Any grandparent these days is well aware of Pokemon, Minecraft, Lego, Halo, Spiderman, Elsa and a dozen other subjects for Halloween costumes.

I’m thinking about skipping.

The girl in the Pokemon costume did it flawlessly, but I always had a hard time with it.

Skipping, as this old man recalls, was introduced in “phys-ed” classes early in elementary school. The purpose, I suppose, was to develop what educators these days refer to as gross motor skills. In other words, moving our bodies appropriately.

But even as a kid in second grade, I remember wondering what the heck skipping was for.

Walking made sense. Most of us had figured that out by the time we were one year old.

Running made sense. It was fun, and it was especially useful about the time you encountered your first bully.

But skipping?

Would there be a time in our adult lives when someone would ask in a job interview, “So, how is your skipping?”

Would there be a time when we had asked our true love to wed when she might say to a friend, “Well, he’s a great guy, but he can’t skip for crap”?

Would an encounter with zombies or Godzilla or some other preternatural threat ever occur where the best escape involved skipping?

I didn’t think so.

Then again, I wasn’t particularly coordinated when it came to skipping, so maybe that colored my opinion.

(Somewhere in the musty old files from Judge Haynes Elementary School, there may be a report card that makes my shortcomings clear. “Skipping: Unsatisfactory. Needs improvement.”)

But at the same time, I have to say I have never in my adult life felt the need to skip.

(A caveat: I did skip classes now and then in college. Some of my old professors might want to weigh in and say that it was more than “now and then.” It might have been more serious than that. In fact, the wonderful prof of my class in Shakespeare would attest — if she were still living — that she drew great pleasure from the fact that my class-skipping habits became a problem when she moved the site of our twice-weekly gatherings. I showed up for class only to find that it had been moved. When I finally tracked the class down, the prof’s smile taught me volumes.)

Skipping class is one thing. Skipping along the sidewalk is another.

While I learned my lesson about skipping class, I still can’t skip worth a darn.

And yet — though I know it’s not at all practical — when I saw that girl in the Pokemon costume skip down the sidewalk after collecting her trick-or-treat candy the other night, all I could do was smile.

Maybe it’s the very fact that skipping is frivolous, fun, a bit silly and anything but practical is precisely why we need it.

It makes us smile. It makes me smile.