Lessons

    If only we'd known then all that we know now, maybe we wouldn't have thought we knew everything. We were young - it's the only applicable excuse. Young, and wild, and so sure we'd take the world by storm; so gung ho in our war against age, and wisdom, and authority; so trusting of the American dream that we didn't know we were dreaming. Hell, we didn't even know we were asleep.

    And when I think of us now, I think only of how stupid we were, how arrogant, and I look at my own children and think that they might one day do as I did and the thought terrifies me, because the lessons that I learned back in another lifetime never came cheap.

    We thought we were immortal - I suppose every kid does at one time or another. We led sheltered lives in sheltered homes behind sheltered hedges, over which our mothers gossiped and our fathers traded power tools. We thought war was a card game, and nobody told us any different.

    During the long, hot summers of our youth, we would recruit the big brother of one of our rag-tag gang to chauffer us to the river just outside of town. Although back then it was never a discussion point, I suspect now that assurances must have been made to the adults responsible for us that big brother would play babysitter as we swam, but those assurances always proved false. Big brother would drop us off in the morning, and return in the late afternoon, and our time was our own.

    There was a bridge over that river. Not a very high bridge - maybe ten feet above the water in winter, when the water was high. The more daring among us would walk to the middle of the bridge, climb the side, and jump. We were immortal, remember. Nothing bad could happen to us.

    The winter of our fifth grade year, there was a flood. The deep, still hole beneath the bridge filled with submerged rocks and logs. We didn't know. When fifth grade let out and that long, hot summer stretched before us, we made for the river just like always. The most daring among us walked to middle of the bridge, climbed the side, and jumped. By the time we realized something was wrong and frantically summoned a fisherman on the opposite bank, the most daring among us had been underwater for nearly seven minutes. Had he lived (which he didn't) he would have been a vegetable - his neck was broken. We weren't immortal anymore.

    It may have the hardest lesson to learn, but it wouldn't be the last. We grew older, and we watched Thurston and Columbine high schools shot up on TV, and we learned what happens when, in the midst of a national gun crisis, a high school senior forgets to take the hunting rifle out of the truck one October morning before heading to school. Eventually, they gave Andy his diploma, but he wasn't allowed to walk with our class on graduation night. He would have been valedictorian.

    We learned why you shouldn't have sex on birth control and antibiotics, and why cars need brake fluid. We learned why friends don't let friends drink and drive - but only after Liz left the party and never made it home.

    We learned how to cheat on mid-terms using the text message features on our cell phones, and it was good until the teachers caught on, at which point we also learned what happens when a senior fails first semester English Lit.

    We went to health class and learned why cigarettes were bad for us, but when it came right down to it, we smoked them by the carton anyway.

    Somewhere along the line, we learned that vodka melts Slurpees.

    We're grown now - that rag-tag group who grew up on the same street in a town that is much bigger than it was then. We have families of our own, children who we hope will be smarter than we ever were, and sometimes we run into each other in the grocery store, or at the playground, and spend a few moments lost in the nostalgia of yesterday. We trade phone numbers and promise to call, and we never do. I suppose it's the price that we paid for our dearest wish back then - to grow up.
   
I don't think we realized the price would be quite so steep.