Each year at this time the members of my family commemorate the night when b!X and a friend of his got arrested for shooting off firecrackers in a school yard. Their other two friends managed to get away.
They were all out celebratiang their graduation from high school. Unfortunately, they set off their firecrackers in a schoolyard other than their own, and there recently had been vandalism in some neighboring schoolyards. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong kids.
And so we all went to court, and b!X got community service. But that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was getting handcuffed and tossed into the back of a patrol car and having the police wake your mother up at 3 a.m. to tell her to come and pick up her son at the stationhouse.
I wasn’t even mad when I saw him walk through the door. I was just relieved that he was OK and that all he did was get caught shooting off illegal firecrackers.
The trouble that b!X gets into these days is more the verbal kind, and the little cartoon of him that I attached to the firecrackers, above, was published in a Portland area newspaper, and at the other end of the arm was a computer.