You Meddling Kids

I have a pretty good idea when I turned into an adult. It was the night that I waited in the shadows next to our garage, waiting for the neighborhood boys to come sneaking over our back fence to grab our apples under cover of darkness. I watched three of them come in, and when one of them climbed up into the tree, I made my move. The two on the ground left their treed friend high and dry, and I caught him as he tried to untangle himself from the branches. I asked the first of what would be a series of mind-numbingly ridiculous questions: "What are you doing back here?"
That's how it starts. Kids think that grownups are stupid because they ask such stupid questions. Grownups think kids are insolent because they give smart aleck answers to such moronic inquiries. The phrase "Duh" was created specifically for this interaction. This kid and his buddies were hopping our fence to grab some apples in the time honored tradition of Tom Sawyer and Adam and Eve. It is what kids do. Little did I know that I was fulfilling my biological imperative by serving as the cranky old neighbor who chases them.
I marched this boy out the front gate of our yard, up the steps of the apartment building next door and knocked on his father's door. There was a lot of shame and embarrassment tossed around, and we all agreed that it would never happen again. And it never did - at least while we were home. Eventually we got a dog, and that made strangers less interested in wandering into "The Old Caven Place."
I listen to Green Day. I watch "Pimp My Ride". I'm not a grouchy old man. I'm still in my prime. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself. Sometimes when I hear myself start off on a lecture to my son or the kids in my class, the eyes of my inner child roll to the sky. What's the matter with the kids today? I'm not sure I'm equipped to say. I just know that I am, and have been, on the other side of that fence for a while now. "Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation." -Adlai E. Stevenson
And since I'm old enough to quote Adlai Stevenson, I guess it must be true.