Every year, On June 17, our family commemorates b!X’s arresting crime spree.
It was 1987, and he and some of his friends were celebrating graduating from high school. Only they made the mistake of celebrating by lighting firecrackers late at night in the schoolyard of a local Cathlic School. There recently had been vandalism in some neighboring schoolyards, so the cops were on the lookout. 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 that led to the back of the police station. I was just relieved that he was OK and that all he did was get caught shooting off illegal firecrackers.
Any trouble that b!X has gotten into since that time has been more the verbal kind, and this little cartoon of him that I attached to the firecrackers was once published in a Portland area newspaper But at the other end of the arm was a computer.
So, sonb!X, in loving remembrance of the gray hairs you gave me that night, 20 years ago: