BACK IN MY DAY…

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Maybe I am just looking back on my childhood with a jaded memory, but I swear that I used to have a healthy fear of adults.

Now, before I get started, let me go ahead and say that, at times, I was less than the model child. I will now pause for any former teachers who are reading to stop laughing and regain their composure.

OK, so I was a pain more often than not. But one thing I am fairly sure of: I was plenty scared of unknown adults. If some random adult got onto me for no reason, I usually snapped to attention, started throwing around “sirs” and “ma’ams” and generally behaved while in their line of vision. The main reason I did this is because, as a teen-ager, I assumed that every adult was either (a) an undercover police officer who could arrest me just for looking shifty or (b) a friend of my parents, and thus wielded far more power than any police officer. If the cops haul you in, you go to jail. If your parents’ friends rat you out, you get called into the living room for “a talk,” which is about 7,000 times worse than any jail cell. Also, as a kid, I was pretty sure that all of the parents in town had weekly meetings so that they could spread the word about whose children were speeding or sneaking out or arming the Nicaraguans, as kids were wont to do in those days. So basically, no good could come from an adult getting on to you, whether you were doing something wrong or not.

But recently, I have noticed that a good healthy fear of adults does not exist, or at least a good healthy fear of this adult. I bring to your attention two recent events that have happened in my neighborhood. The first involved a young man with an exceptionally loud car and an exceptionally heavy right foot.

I was standing in my front yard when the car decided to travel down my street at speeds normally reserved for departing aircraft. I live on a cul-de-sac, one with plenty of children. We don’t need drag strip time trials going on. This got me more than a little upset, so I started across my yard, whistling at the car. When he continued to speed up, I began to announce my displeasure with his driving by screaming, “HEY!!!!! HEY!!!!”

I assumed that he would realize his error and slow down. Slow down, he did. In fact, he screeched to a halt and jumped out of his car. “You need to slow down,” I said to him. He had no desire to discuss this matter, however.

“If you’re yelling at me,” he screamed to me, “you’re yelling at my girl!” I was unaware that we had been sucked into a time warp that put us in a 1950s movie.

“Look, you need to slow down in this neighborhood. There are a lot of kids that play around here,” I said, unable to think of a comeback to his defense of his best girl.

“You just can’t handle it because my car’s loud,” he said. Silly me, I always thought that a loud car was something you had fixed, not something you bragged about. I was unsure how to respond to this. All I wanted him to do was to slow down. He, meanwhile, wanted me to be impressed with what sounded like a mufferless car.

“Just slow down,” I said, as I turned to walk away, remembering that many young people today are armed.

The next time also occurred in my neighborhood. My family and I were heading home one evening, when we saw two teen-age boys walking down the middle of the road. That in and of itself wasn’t bad, assuming they had the sense to get out of the middle of the road when a car was coming. They didn’t.

As I slowed to a stop behind them, one of them turned, looked at us, and proceeded to bend his head down and spit. Goodness knows, you shouldn’t let a 2,000 pound vehicle on the road get in the way of a good spit.

I eased my car to the side of one of the boys, and rolled down my window.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Huh?” was his Mensa-esque reply.

“Don’t stand in the middle of the road. Don’t do that. Just…don’t.”

Both of them now were staring at me with the look of my dog if I tried to explain trigonometry to him. As I moved past them, they started to say something, probably less than polite. My wife suggested I proceed on home, lest that little vein in my forehead start talking again.

I don’t know what has happened with kids. In either of these situations, I would have turned into a good little sheep. A healthy fear of adults is a good thing, and these kids certainly need it. Maybe their parents just need to be aware of their actions. Perhaps I’ll tell them at the next meeting.