The Great Eighty-Eight

There are plenty of things to frighten a parent. Chicken Pox, mean kids, kidnappers and bad babysitters are some of the things that come to mind. Handing your teenager the keys to a car and letting him drive out there in the world by himself has to be right up there.
This happened to us exactly one month ago. Already, we have a speeding ticket to show for it. 88 in a 70. Eighty-Eight! Miles per Hour. On the interstate (thank God).
“I wasn’t paying attention. I was following another car, passing on the left going down a hill.” That’s what we got. That’s the best he could do. This is so alarming; I can’t even be clever about it. He had other people’s children in the car with him. He was so unaware of his surroundings that when I asked him what agency issued the ticket, he had no clue. “What do you mean?” was his clever question. I asked, “Was it a state trooper, a sheriff’s deputy or a city policeman?” He had no idea. He said the guy’s uniform was blue. That’s the best he could do?
Since nobody’s dead or injured, this may be the best thing that could have happened to him. The officer of ambiguous origin gave him an appropriate scare. He’s going to be forced into manual labor to pay off the fine, which I’m sure will be hefty. Plus, he will be forced to attend some kind of speed deterrent classes.
I guess you just have to learn. He drove with a permit for a year, and we were constantly on him about his speed. I said to him, after the Great Eighty-Eight, “I know you think you’re invincible, but you’re not.” He really was convinced that police don’t enforce speed restrictions on the interstate. He found out the hard way that he was wrong. Thankfully, he was not dead wrong. He didn’t pay attention to his parents, but apparently he is paying attention to the guy in his rear-view mirror with the flashing lights.
His teenage indiscretions have been mild, and we’re thankful for that. Most of them have been somewhere on the line between annoying and amusing; but none have been legitimately frightening so far.
This one, I can’t get out of my mind. He was much closer to 100 mph than he was to the speed limit of 70.
I used to make fun of my mother, because she said that every time she heard an emergency siren, she thought for a second that something might have happened to my brother. Now, I feel as if I owe her an apology. This 88 thing has emotionally scarred me. I was naïve. I trusted the kid in his car. I didn’t worry when he was out there. Now, I’ve gone to the opposite extreme. It’s constantly on my mind.
The only other time I’ve been this worried about this kid, he was still in diapers. He and I were alone in the house. I went to the bathroom for a couple of minutes. When I came out, I couldn’t find him anywhere. I called him, looked everywhere and got a little panicky when I saw the front door was open. He had toddled into the yard, across the street and three houses down to play in Audrey Lewis’ garden. He was just sitting there, watching this little bird feeder spin around in the breeze. While I was relieved to see him, my mind was whirring with the awful possibilities this circumstance presented.
When I think about 88 Miles per hour, I feel almost exactly the same way.

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