I made the trip to Massachusetts on Saturday and brought the boy home on Sunday. It did not take very long to pack the car; I expect it may take a while longer to unpack it. (We have been home three days and there is still gear in the back of the van.)
This pandemic school year was a non-starter for him. Change of venue to basically be sequestered anyway did nothing to change the outcome. Remote, completely self-driven learning is not this kid’s thing, and he is not alone. Seems as though many young people, faced with uncertainty and zero interaction, simply opted to opt out.
His homecoming was a celebratory event, complete with his favorite meal (steak and fries) and a cake (!) for dessert. The Prodigal Son Returns.
What did he do the minute he got home? Hopped in the car with his friends to go who knows where – apparently the driver is directionally challenged and went one way instead of another – and then collected yet another friend to go to the newly-opened pizza joint down the street. You know, what teenaged boys do after a three month hiatus from home.
The boy’s heralded return wasn’t the only big event of the day – we had a FULL family zoom call, complete with other prodigal family members, spouses and cameo appearances by at least one family’s children and a snake named Kevin. (My kids, of course, were not present.)
It was an educational event. Things I did not know about my brothers: Bob was an EMT at age 16 and saved his foster father from being murdered with an ashtray by his foster mother. Being an EMT had zero to do with the saving of the guy, but certainly went a long way to fixing up the man’s considerable head wound, which, in the man’s advanced state of inebriation, he mistook for a gunshot wound.
I learned that Bob and Jim dismantled an entire vehicle, leaving just the motor, seats and frame, and drove it into the forest, smash-up derby-style, leaving it there until the local cops knocked on their door, insisting they remove said vehicle from the woods. That operation apparently was considerably more difficult than the installation.
I learned that the brothers not only knew about, but vividly remember, our uncle’s house on Martha’s Vineyard and how parties at said home included kegs of beer for the adults and birch beer for the kids. (The birch beer mention tickled something way, way in the back of my mind but nothing came of it.) That my dad would drop them off and they’d run roughshod through tennis courts and gardens, playing whack-a-ball with discarded tennis balls and pieces of driftwood. I’ll be honest, I was feeling a bit jealous, as I remember none of the Vineyard mischief. It was definitely after I was born, but before I was old enough to safely tag along. They had a whole world of experience that I knew nothing about.
I had the great misfortune to have been born a whole three years after Jim, making it impossible to have been part of the early days of the posse. I not only missed out on the ruining of clay tennis courts on the Vineyard, but on the measles, mumps and chicken pox – all three brothers had already gone through the gamut of childhood diseases before my birth. (It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that I caught chicken pox from a six-year old on my school bus – I wasn’t an attractive teenager to begin with. Add chicken pox to that and it is a recipe for angst.)
We carry a lot of baggage, my siblings and I. There are great stories in those bags; stories of triumph and tragedy alike. And as Bob sagely opined, it is all of those experiences – the good, the bad, the sad and the wonderful – that have made us all the people we are today and in the circumstances we find ourselves.
I can only hope we aren’t too old for shenanigans.