It's Elmo's world, we're just living in it.

 This morning I took my two youngest to the park in Belmont, a very nice park, to play for awhile. Being a beautiful fall day with a little nip to the breeze we had on our pull-overs, mine and Sam's did not attract notice but Bens made him the star of the play ground. You may have guessed, given the title of the blog, that Ben was wearing an Elmo pull-over and you'd have guessed right. Ben's four and a big four at that and he was wearing this red hoodie with a large picture of every childs favorite Sesame Street resident on it, I don't know how we survived growing up before Elmo (Grover was always my favorite), and to a smaller child, well one smaller child in particular, he must have seen life sized. There were a few other children on the playground, all on the young side (young side of four mind you) and all a good deal smaller than Ben. One little boy, couldn't have been much more than a year old, took one look at Ben and his eyes grew large, he pointed at Ben and said 'Elmo'. He stared, star-struck, looked to his mom and said, "Momma, that Elmo." "Yes," replied the young fanatic's mother,"he's got Elmo on his shirt." Ben quickly pointed out to the woman that "That's my jacket, I've got wrestlers on my shirt." He proceeded to pull up his jacket to show her and she gave him a 'work with me kid' look and a nice little smile and nod. The young Elmo fan however was not to be dissuaded, he followed Ben around the playground much of the time we were there and occasionally would come up to him, wave at his 'jacket' and say, "Hey, Elmo." Eventually it came time for us to depart, I picked up Sam and told Ben to come on and we started away from the play equipment, Elmo's number one fan followed right along. His mother grabbed him by the arm right as he was leaving the play area, we told him bye and waved and he stood there on the edge of fandom and waved the way little kids do, with just their fingers moving, and said "Bye, Elmo." I'm sure if his mother would have let him he would have followed us all the way to, oh darn, I forget how you get there. Can you tell me? Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street? How to get to Sesame Street?