What Me Worry

The first twinkle of Spring Break has appeared on the horizon of my son's senior year in high school, and suddenly he has a definite and decided urge to hit the road. This doesn't come as a huge surprise, since he is a creature of the road. His desire to head on up the highway with his buddies is as much a part of his car culture cranium as it is that nearly eighteen year old brain that is itching to get out and see the world. And I couldn't be more terrified.
Okay, maybe I'm overstating my concern. To the present, my son has avoided many of the teenage pitfalls I myself encountered by the time I was a senior in high school. His screaming and yelling has been limited to the screen on which his friends are playing Mario Kart, with the spoken understanding that it is all in good fun. His frustrations with his parents have stuck on simmer, never boiling into adolescent fury. All of that wild talk about fast cars has been limited primarily to the aforementioned Mario Kart races and other cyber speedways. His real world driving skills are much more relaxed and defensive. Drinking and drugs? As he reminds his parents on occasion: He goes to high school in Oakland, California. If he hadn't run into any kind of temptation by now, it would have been some sort of sociological miracle. Presently, none of those temptations has led to any sort of angry confrontations or interventions. Maybe I'm paranoid. From that Latin, Parentis. Maybe I'm realistic, from the Latin loco.
Whatever the case, I find myself reflecting back on my own mildly misspent youth and wondering how I can allow the fun I had be my son's without the bumps and bruises that came with my near-misses. I remembered the story I wrote recounting a road trip I took in college. Two of my buddies and I trekked across the plains to Muskogee, Oklahoma with the intent of seeing a high school football game at one of our friends' alma maters. We didn't make it to the game. We did nearly blow up a Volkswagen bug. We did drive around Muskogee in a land yacht lovingly christened "The DynoBuick." We did go see "Pink Floyd's The Wall The Movie" in a tiny concrete bunker of a theater. We prepped for the experience by pounding through a case of Busch beer with some of the locals at a park next to the Veteran's Hospital. I was aware that there was some other substances about, but what would you expect? These guys went to high school in Muskogee, Oklahoma. That's where I learned about curb parties. The ingredients were pretty simple: a curb and more of the aforementioned Busch beer. The idea was that if you were headed for the gutter anyway, you were already pretty close. The title of the chronicle of this misadventure was "Festival of the Wretched," and its style and substance was heavily influenced by the work of Hunter S. Thompson.
And that's where I finally landed: I wonder what Dr. Thompson told his son before sending his son off on Spring Break?