Supervision

 My mother used to talk wistfully about how if Child Protective Services were alerted now to the things that she had allowed her three sons to do once upon a time, they would have swooped in and taken us all away never to return. Especially in the helicopter parent reality of today. The tired bit I do about how disappointed she was when all three of us would return from an afternoon of playing with foot-long steel-tipped lawn darts. All three of us were allowed, encouraged, to zip up and down the dirt road in front of our mountain cabin for hours on end with only the promise to wear a helmet as our safety guidelines. These were the things that regularly occurred with complete knowledge of the parental units. 

Were there other things that we dared to do for which my parents were never fully apprised? 

Yes. There were. 

Plenty of them. 

Like the multiple occasions a bunch of us neighborhood kids trekked up the hill to another street with a looping slope to their street and experimented with various ways of riding our skateboards in tandem. The one that was the most exhilarating involved sitting on our boards facing one another, legs and arms intertwined. Steering was accomplished by leaning back and forth as we gathered speed on our descent. Usually, there were no cars on that suburban stretch of street to dodge. 

Usually. 

Close calls were badges of honor. Scrapes and bruises were walked off because anyone returning home early would potentially send up an alarm. Like the epic dirt-clod fights held at the construction sites within a bike ride's distance of our home. Every so often, one of those clods contained a little higher rock content and created an owie that might have shut down the battle. "Suck it up," we encouraged one another, since the alternative was going home.

I was showing off the scar on my left forearm to my wife the other night, explaining how I got it from a spiral staircase in the University of Colorado Fieldhouse. Not in any place where we should or been allowed to be, but rather creeping about in the abandoned corners of a facility that we accessed by crawling through an open window. Telling mom about the cut on my forearm might necessitate telling the rest of the story, and then the jig would be, fundamentally, up. 

And yet, here I am. Sixty-two years old. More or less in one piece. With a whole bunch of stories about how things used to be. Mom, if you're reading this somewhere, I'm pretty sure you had an idea all along.