Raising five sons, we had relatively few major “situations” with any of them. Well excluding automobile mishaps. But even with those, they just tore up cars and never got hurt or hurt anyone else, so except for the high insurance premiums for many years we came out fairly well unscathed.

We didn’t have any bad bouts of them drinking or drugging and getting too much out of hand. Of course they now tell us that there was a lot we didn’t know about. Of course there were things that I knew they did that I never even brought up to them. There just didn’t seem to be a point to it. I knew calling attention to any of it may make it worse.

A far distance memory reared its head just yesterday. My granddaughter, Emma was telling me where her new squeeze lives. It brought back a memory of Madeline and me visiting some people in the same neighborhood.

I guess it didn’t have a huge impact on me, for I had forgotten most of the details of what lead us to make that visit. I called the son that was involved (I won’t even call him name at this time) so he could refresh my memory on how it all unfolded.

Here is his account; seems that he had made a deal to buy a small amount of marijuana from a girl at school. She was suppose to bring it to an event, perhaps a ballgame that evening. She forgot to bring it but told him to come by her house the next morning. He was more than happy to do that on his way to school.

The young girl made a dash out to the awaiting car. Her mother seeing that everything wasn’t what she considered normal, followed right behind the daughter to the car. When she asked what was going on, the girl handed over her purse. In the purse was the marijuana.

The mother got to meet our son and extracted our phone number from him. She called and described what had transpired. During the discussion, somehow it was determined that we all should get together that evening for a talk.

We arrived their house at the appointed time that evening after the dad had gotten off work. All went pretty well. I’m not sure but what they thought our son was corrupting their daughter. But it would have been easy enough for us to have thought just the opposite.

Anyway as we visited for a while the other parents started telling us how much marijuana they had smoked in their younger years. They must have thought Madeline and I were from another planet when we told them we’d never smoked any or ever had the desire. Or perhaps they thought we were trying to impress our son, of what great straight laced parents he had. It was all slightly awkward, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, everything turned out fine. I think they got their daughter raised and our son has now made it past 40, so I guess it was we can all smile about the incident.

Oh, we did have a benefit out of the visit. We met the older sister of the girl that night. She was still living at home. It was our first time to meet our twin sons English teacher.