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We Grow Up So Quickly

By Lee Ostaszewski

My oldest, Kevin, is starting high school this September and, let’s not kid anyone, as much as Beth and I try to downplay it and tell Kevin it is just the beginning of another school year, we know that this is a very big, important step into adulthood...for Beth and myself.

It’s probably a big deal for Kevin, too.

Imagine, we will soon be the parents of a high school student. A high school kid is something grownups have. Not us. Ward and June Cleaver have a kid in high school, we don’t. As much as we have known it was coming, prepared for it, and even looked forward to it, now that it is almost here the thought that I’m soon to be a high school parent is shocking.

Fathers of high school students are middle-aged, balding men with too much abdominal padding who drive a car that seats more than two people comfortably.

Oh crap! That IS me!

All joking aside, I know that entering high school is an exciting time for Kevin. It was an exciting time for me, and that occurred more than 30 years ago, known by archaeologists as the Paleolithic era.

To give an idea how much things have changed, when I started high school in 1975 we had a Republican president in office who people didn’t think was too intelligent, rising gas prices, California earthquakes, a huge federal deficit, and aging rock groups such as The Rolling Stones and The Who still touring. What a difference three decades can make.

The biggest difference, of course, has been in technology, especially the availability of electronics and computers. When I started high school the only electronic personal device anyone owned, other than an electric toothbrush, was a pocket calculator, the smallest of which was approximately the same size as a paperback novel. And if it offered any advanced functions at all that meant it had a square root key.

There were no such things as personal computers, or email, or cell phones, or texting. When you needed to communicate with someone far away you did so by writing a letter or calling by phone. Calling generally

meant standing by the wall phone in the kitchen or sitting on the family room sofa next to the phone on the end table. If there were cordless phones back then, I didn’t know a single family that owned one. To make our phone less restrictive, my dad replaced the standard phone cord with one long enough to reach across two state lines. I could carry on a conversation on the phone while in another room, the only problem being that the cord was stretched taut behind me, knocking over lamps and strangling the occasional family member.

Another innovation we didn’t have back in the mid 1970s was cable television. It might not seem like much of a hardship to not have the Food Network or E!, but for adolescent boys learning about the world, not having cable TV meant having to learn new swear words the old-fashioned way, by listening to our parents talk when they didn’t think we could hear them. We would then discuss with our friends what we thought the words meant. Not that my friends had any idea, either.

Another thing I remember about my first days in high school was worrying about pretty much everything: My classes, my teachers, what the upperclassmen planned to do to torture us freshman. All during 8^th grade we kept hearing reports from older kids about what goes on in high school. To sum it up, the advice given was to stay away from any open lockers and those large, janitorial trash cans, and most importantly never, under any circumstances, enter the boy’s restroom.

The lockers and trash cans were places freshmen routinely were stuffed into, sometimes for weeks at a time. The restrooms, well that sounded more like stepping through some sort of space-time portal into a savage, post-apocalyptic world. I didn’t use a high school restroom until my junior year.

So how did I go from frightened, bladder-filled freshman to father of an incoming freshman so quickly? Who knows? But I might as well face the facts: I’m middle-aged, balding, drive a family car, and will soon have a child in high school.

I guess I’m all grown up, now. I’m Ward Freakin’ Cleaver. ■