Looking at Distant Water and Thinking About What Kids Do

Photo credit: Michael J. French, Verona Beach State Park, Verona Beach, NY April 10, 2021

I’m on a porch drinking a light beer and looking at the Gulf. Distant water gets to be traditional blue. As you get closer a sand bar gives emerald and right up on the coast ugly seaweed paints it a dull brown. That’s not every day but right now I’m looking at the oceanic version of a flag from a disinterested third world country wafting insistent stripes on the Florida coast.

There’s a creepy congregation of gulls that populate a spot of beach directly from our rented house and slightly to the left. I dislike them immensely though I can’t say why.

My children are of the age that when they want to go down and play in the sand with a variety of cousins, no adult is required but all the adults decide to sit on the porch with a glass of something where visual checks of the kids can be made. They are on their beginning stage of personal ownership, but we are watching.

They break into groups. The bulk fly in this swarm of nine- to eleven-year-old rage that breaks up on command for hot dogs and cake. The youngers tend to keep to a mother’s reach and the oldest are doing their best to be lost. My fifteen year old bounces between kid’s games and interactions with the taxable set. He’s in a funny sub directory where he can’t drive without a guardian passenger but looks toward everyone else that can’t drive at all as a momentary distraction. I couldn’t tell you which Harry Potter mid series novel best assesses his situation, but he could.

I calmly teach him how to drive in obeisance to his driving learner’s permit. There are scary moments and I fear for my neighbor’s mail boxes, but he’s doing well. Parking in all its forms are a distant dream but we are progressing. When I was fifteen, I took my parents car out all the time.

A friend was better at it than me. She lived with her grandmother in Birmingham while her parents were piecemeal moving from a smaller town to the west called Jasper. Her grandmother, nice as could be and bless her, went to bed around nine, so we had a car from nine until. Her grandmother lived a few blocks from a police station and that aspect of wrong in the shadow of right just made it better.

We would walk into our houses and check in to curfew with our somnambulant parents and then out the back door and to wherever. There were several venues that took to vagrant late-night teens, but my favorite was The Eclectic Theater.

I think Birmingham is a weird city. Between First Avenue South and First Avenue North there’s Morris Avenue. For no reason Morris Avenue is cobblestone. Maybe there’s a reason – Chesterton’s fence – but I haven’t grasped it in the here and now.

The Eclectic Theater was on Morris Avenue and didn’t ask for ID. They didn’t ask for much of anything. You could get a can of Bud for a buck or two and if you were there late enough the buck or two wasn’t necessary and you might get a crap burger from one of a dozen locally owned joints in the neighborhood when an employee grabbed a bundle for the staff and a punk band decided that though they were finished for the paid show they’d play a few more songs. After two am the company was the currency. Chip in if you could. I didn’t join with the junkies – and there were some – but I could mingle. Just hold off for the occasional pause in conversation while they let the hit sink in and all was well. Twenty minutes slouching and they were back to normal.

My most egregious illicit car borrowing ended up in a totaled Buick that belonged to my dad left and a girlfriend momentarily stranded.

She was shipped off to boarding school at a time when long distance calls from Alabama to North Carolina limited our contact. No one who’s grown up in the last couple of decades plus five years will get this, but we had a mail system that took days to relay messages from one locality to another. Sometimes when you received a letter it made the one you sent moot and then you had to send a letter explaining that the last letter you sent was sent before the last letter you received, and it was chaos.

So we spoke on the phone illicitly expensively. Collect calls and all. My girlfriend and her roommate were going to hop the walls of their boarding school and wander the Earth. I sensed a knightly save the damsel instinct and told them to hold off. Help was on the way.

Somewhere around midnight I took the car.

Despite anger my parent’s biggest question was “How did you get through Atlanta.”

My dad spent some twenty minutes looking for his keys the next morning asking “Where are my keys?” until my brother, eight at the time, demonstrated his deadpan brilliance by saying “Your car’s gone too, dad.” He’s still brilliantly deadpan and almost as funny as me.

Atlanta is hairy, but I was a veteran of the learn it yourself driving school because we wanted to meet up with girls and that meant being so careful so as not to attract the eye of the law.

Somewhere in North Carolina I learned that there is such a thing as a blind spot. I was merging into a seemingly clear traffic lane when a car appeared in my side mirror and in order to avoid hitting that magical pop-up vehicle that I swear wasn’t there a second ago I swerved into the guard rail and bounced back and forth between the near and far side until I ran out of momentum. Somehow, I didn’t hit any other cars.

When the police showed up, they asked for my ID, and I told the truth. I was 15. No license. Next, I said the smartest thing any 15 year old who has done something incredibly stupid could have possibly said. The officer asked me what I was running from. I said that I wasn’t running from anything. I was running to something.

Because of that my parents never got a child services questionnaire. The NC cops got it that I was a lovesick dipshit. I had a few mixed tapes she made me, a few letters she had sent me, and a certainty that I was in the right. That resonated with my arresters.

This kick started my high school lawn mowing career. My dad, after making sure that I was okay, let me know that I just spent the money he saved to buy me a car when I turned 16. I had to earn money for a car. I think that was for the better. You need to temper your Quixotic urges and work is edifying.

The girlfriend and her roommate did end up running away from school a few days later. They called me when I got back to Birmingham from a hotel they’d absconded to in NC. I ratted them out. For the same reason that I stole a car and drove some 500 + miles I was worried about them. They were going out alone as 16 year olds. I foolishly thought 15 year old me could protect them. So, when they did it on their own, I worried. When they escaped the boarding school, I told my dad and we drove to her parents house and I gave them the hotel’s address, the phone number, and anything else I could. I saw the hatred they regarded me with, knowing what I attempted a few days earlier. But they called the police and the girls were brought home. I never got to see the hatred my girlfriend regarded me with. It would be years before she spoke to me again.

I see her now every so often and we get along wonderfully. Time and perspective. Her parents downsized from a wonderful palace to a wonderful smaller palace and I take my kids down their road every Halloween. The first time I realized we were trick or treating at their house – they set up a table in the front yard – I was suddenly nervous. They recognized me immediately. The mother hugged me and what happened twenty years ago happened twenty years ago. We said nothing about the escape attempts. We chatted about my kids and their grandkids.

I was foolish and ran with a foolish crowd, but one of those 15 year old drivers teaches at my son’s high school, another along with the former girlfriend are society types that do wonderful charity work, there’s an immigration lawyer, a Nashville song producer, at least one PHD, and a vicious litigator.

When I grew up when you did something stupid you were castigated and maybe pushed to the edge of the fold. Going back further my uncles would tell me stories of getting caught with beer by the police. The consequence was a call to the parents in their days. “Come pick up your little reprobates,” would be the gist.

I’m sitting on a beachfront porch with sons, nephews, and cousin’s children roaming in differentiated freedoms. The newly 18 year old is sipping a beer. I don’t think our society is as forgiving as it once was. Mischief, and I say this as someone who ran far beyond the word as previously understood, is slipping backwards as criminality fills the void. Kids will continue in stupidity. They will do things dumb, but creepingly they will do things needlessly prosecutable.

It’s terrifying. The kids may perceive that they act along with their better angels, but inexperience leads the astray. I was a horror show. Thankfully I lived in a more forgiving time.

It’s not just my kids. There’s a beach full. They are going to misbehave.