Misspent Youth

As I have mentioned here before, I wasn't much of a juvenile delinquent. I got some speeding tickets. I used to hang around late at night on playgrounds. Mostly on the swingsets. I didn't smoke. I didn't start drinking until the end of my senior year in high school. The cars I wrecked were due primarily to stupidity rather than recklessness. I was in the marching band. How much trouble could I get into?
As it turns out, not very much. I'm certain that this didn't keep my parents from worrying about me. I didn't stay out late. I didn't come home drunk. I wasn't dealing drugs. I didn't even smoke pot until I was in college. Maybe what they were worried about was the ever-expanding stash of street signs, road cones, and other city property that showing up in my bedroom. It all started with bus numbers. Long before there were these fancy electronic reader board in the back window or along the sides of our town's public transportation explaining what routes those buses would run. The first one I brought home was a number four, the line that ran up the street a block from my house. It was just sitting on the sidewalk about a block from the bus stop, probably having fallen from its slot after hitting a bump. It was a memento. The second and third came about the same way. I just found them laying on or near the curb, a testament to the low technology involved in identifying our buses. Now that I had a four, a two and a five, I started to wonder what it might take to get all seven Boulder city routes. As I began to consider my options, riding my bike home from school, I spotted a STOP sign laying in the weeds. I stopped, since the sign had suggested it, and stared. I began to rationalize how this was not any different than a bus number. Except it was too large to stick in my backpack. Instead, I draped my windbreaker over it and rode the two miles back to my house as casually as I possibly could. Back to my room in the basement that was now starting to look more like storage for public works.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I had achieved my dream of having all the bus numbers, including the elusive number seven, which ran on the northeast corner of the city limits. This came to me as a gift, from the same friends, the same friends who brought me a Rocky Mountain News mailbox still attached to its pole and the same friends who helped me liberate a flashing barricade to stand as a centerpiece at one of our parties. It took us an hour to figure out how we could turn it off at the end of the night so it could be rolled back into the corner of my room, light off, until we needed it again.
All this time, my parents said nothing. Or next to nothing. I guess it was the affectation I was allowed. I was getting good grades. I wasn't coming home drunk, I was in marching band. I played tuba in marching band. I mowed the lawn. I didn't cause any trouble. Except for that bedroom full of government property. After I moved out, my father scooped it all up and loaded it into the family station wagon, bus numbers and all, and dropped it on the steps of the Municipal Building. In the middle of the night. Pretty sketchy behavior, wouldn't you say?