Handcuffed to the Bumper

When I was a senior in college I spent a lot of time drinking beer and playing golf. A bunch of us listened to the Born in the USA record over and over and over and over again. One guy loved the song, Darlington County and in particular the line:

I saw Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford.

And all the crazy things about being a pretty irresponsible-thought-we-were-the-coolest-idiot comes rushing back to me when I hear Matt making plans for the weekend and/or watching him post self-indulgent things on the Google machine.

And let me tell you, we did some crazy things.

I remember painting the viaduct with some buddies in the summer following my senior year in high school. We painted "Rolling Stones" across the 18' high bridge after drinking a few beers. We were sitting in the church parking lot, on the paint cans when a cop pulled in to ask us what we'd been doing all night.

"Just hanging out," we said. The paint dripped off the viaduct onto the road below. You didn't have to be Perry Mason to figure it all out.

We should have been tied to his bumper, but things were a little more lax in those days I suppose.

And since Matt just finished his freshman year I thought of all the fun we had freshman year. He was talking the other night and I flashed back to the big formal dance at Gannon - the 8-ball. We were dressed in suits and ties and we made plans to attend the dance and then meet up with a bunch of girls at a place they owned by the lake.

One flaw in the plan:

We drank grain alcohol that night.

I can still remember waking up in my suit with my shoes still on, and hearing Gag stir across the room.

"What the hell are we doing here?" he asked as he gazed around our dorm room.

We never saw the lake. Never saw the girls again either.

And there were a lot of goofy nights. Just weird, mostly harmless gatherings of some real morons.

And we made it through.

I think one of the most difficult things about being a parent is knowing when to put the hammer down and when to allow the little dorks find out for themselves what the flaws in the plan really are.

Thankfully my kids aren't hurting for confidence. You should hear them chirp at one another as they shoot hoops in the driveway.

It reminds me of all those games all those years ago.

And thus far, they have mostly used a bit of common sense. I don't think they've put themselves in harms way too many times, but then again, how would I really know?

My parents didn't know everything, right?

But I was never handcuffed to a state trooper's Ford, either.

Some may say I got lucky.