Childhood: Or, My Dance With Stupidity (and, possibly, death)

When I was growing up, my best friend Eric lived one apartment away. We grew up in the days when there were seven television channels, none of which catered to kids (that is, unless you were one of those strange kids who liked "The David Susskind Show"). More importantly, we grew up in the days where moms didn't coordinate play dates or, worse, sit on the floor and play with us. No, they did what they were supposed to do - drink coffee, smoke and complain about the neighbors.

This, of course, presented a host of opportunities, and three of my most vivid memories of growing up, having adventures that could not have occurred without this confluence of events.

Adventure # 1: Eric and I, around the age of 7, opened the window to his brother's room and threw out everything that was not nailed down or was too heavy to lift. And I mean everything. Clothes, books, bedding, toys. Everything. This party was only broken up by the superintendent telling Eric's mom that if she wanted to dispose of trash, he'd be happy to help, but there were better ways to do it.

Adventure # 2: Around that same time, in a variation on our scorched earth strategy, Eric and I took every liquid or near-liquid we could find in his family's bathrooms and poured them into the stopped-up sink. Hair tonic. Toothpaste. Talcum powder. After shave. Shaving cream. For all I know, expensive and necessary medication. Our chief observation? We reached a state of Absolute Green, in which no matter what we added to the mix, the solution remained a mysteriously swampy green. Our genius move? We set the mixture on fire. Clearly we had a gift for controlled experimentation, as the apartment did not transform into the Ocean Parkway Inferno but, rather, the liquid maintained itself as a small, quietly burning, sink-sized lake.

Adventure # 3: This memory is a little more hazy, but I swear it's true. In my bedroom, I was listening to some music on my portable record player. Something inspired me (my money is on Eric) to remove the power cord from the back of the player and - with the plug still inserted into the electrical socket - I put the other end of the cord into my mouth. I remember a faint, pleasant buzzing sensation, but nothing more unusual than that. For reasons that are a mystery to me, I cheated death and lived to engage in other acts of pre-adolescent (and adolescent) stupidity.

Now, my kids were not immune to the allure of idiocy. Growing up, Jake was known on a first-name basis in the emergency room, for varied reasons that included but were not limited to standing on the sliding pond (you can connect these dots, I'm sure). The combination of Ben, a metal bat, a super-springy playground ball, a very dumb, permissive father, and the immutable laws of physics, resulted in a nice, juicy opening just a couple of scary inches above his eye. But, by and large, Susie and I - and no doubt, the same can be said for you - kept a much closer eye on our kids.

I wonder, though. By being so vigilant, did we deny our kids the intoxicating freedom that led to the near-death experiences of my beloved childhood? I'm kinda not kidding, for the most part. Aside from the above adventures, I and my friends traveled on buses and trains at age 10, explored our neighborhood for countless unsupervised hours, and were left largely to our own devices. Our own kids' days were so much more closely managed.

I think about this as Ben is more than halfway through college and as Jake spends more and more time out of the house, as high schoolers do. Because no matter how much we kept the boys in our sights when they were growing up, the moral of the story is that eventually they will get away from you.

Of course, I worry about the same things all parents do - the dangers that seem to be a close companion to all adolescents - but they're good kids and I have all the trust in the world in them. But I just hope that they're finding the time and space to engage in profoundly stupid behavior, as long as they come out the other end, as I did, in one piece.