Rites of Passage: Innocence Found

Our yard was toilet-papered last night. The sight greeted me as I opened the front door in my robe, on my way to retrieve the newspaper on this blustery Saturday morning. I had seen such displays before, but always from the road. From my secure vantage of hustling and busting I would look at the homes of parents of children older than my own, and shake my head with naïve amusement as wearied dads with strange, bemused expressions raked the fluttering ribbons from their trees. It was just one of the things that teenagers did, I figured. I had no reason to take the point further, except to recognize that the scene was part off a world of parenting teenagers that I knew lay somewhere ahead.

Suddenly, I am there; the sight catching me unaware of an inevitable certainty, much like the first look at a snowy august morning. I suppose I should have seen it coming. Starting from the day when my youngest caught me skipping pages during reading at bedtime, changes seemingly beyond my control have become more frequent. All of a sudden I'm not privy to the details of the conflicts between my children and their friends at school. Telephone conversations between my children and unknown sources of information stall when I pass through the room. Suddenly my children don't miss the double entendre of PG-13 comedies; instead, they blush, or worse, laugh as if they have heard the joke before.

Initially I was honored to see the ‘tribute in white'. My son must be popular if someone spent so much time to do this, I reasoned, as if by association his popularity reflected my parental achievements. But I also felt somewhat unsettled. I stood in the middle of a scene heretofore reserved for others, for those older families, and realized that I had been initiated into one more phase of my life. Once more I was being pushed into a new era of parenting, with little warning, and with no formal training. Such is the nature of parenting. In no other job are we expected to adapt, and to ‘ad lib', to such an extent. We aren't told "Oh, there is a TV to fix in there- I know you haven't done it before, but we're expanding beyond widgets". My only preparation at this point is a vague recollection of hearing from those who have been here before me that I should make sure the mess is cleaned up before it rains. I'm not sure why that is important.

I am also touched by a melancholy memory, of the days of my youth and of innocent pranks. Sometime between then and now, pranks seem to have taken on a meaner quality; images of ‘soaping windows' morphing to fears of tainted Halloween candy, or burning bags of dog droppings on porches changing to reports of bombs in mailboxes. The display in front of me this morning reminds me of those innocent days gone by, and I am again touched by the care that has been taken- the bench from the porch carefully balanced atop the basketball backboard, the avoidance of the small tree with the nest of baby birds, the placement of our ‘security sign' neatly in the bushes, where it could easily be found. And nothing has been done to the mailbox, as if in recognition that a mailbox is no longer a thing of innocent pranks. The whole display does not suggest delinquency. Rather there is almost the suggestion of moral character, of knowing the difference between right and wrong, between old-fashioned youthful mischief and modern delinquency.

I wonder if the distinction between innocent pranks and delinquency is even possible in our ‘modern world'. As we try to protect our children, we steer them from potentially mischievous activities lest innocence and evil be mistakenly confused. "You could be shot- or arrested!" we say. Pranks have always had an edge- but it seems that we used to know where that edge was, and more importantly, we genuinely knew that it shouldn't be crossed. Yes, we made mistakes- I think of the late night many years ago, when my friends and I left the mannequin lying on the porch of my parents' house, rang the doorbell, and ran away. I can still hear my mother scream as I think about it. Or I think of the prank phone calls made during a sleepover, and of the guilt I felt later as I read in the small town community newspaper about the elderly disabled woman who was frightened by them. But the stakes seem higher now, and so from the enlightened vantage of parents, we don't mourn the loss of innocent pranks. Their loss is a trade-off for safety, and we accept the loss as an inevitable casualty of the future. They are just another lost privilege, like the quick airport check in lines of the 20th century. By some bizarre progression of society, we can clone an embryo, but we can't find a way to allow trick-or-treating after dark.

But on this morning, my sweet melancholic memory will not be denied by adult pessimism. As the sun breaks the clouds and strikes the brilliant streamers, I realize that innocence is still everywhere, if I choose to look for it. I notice again that nothing is broken, and the baby birds in the nest in the small tree are still hungrily chirping. And then I see the toilet paper hanging on the trees for what it is; a sign that all is well. The world is very different now, yet some things, at least this morning, are the same. And I smile as I chase the kids outside to clean up the mess, quickly, before it rains.