When Cruising Stopped Making Sense

By Kelly Sinon


 Lately, I have noticed my speech has been peppered with, “Those kids”, “These kids”, “Today’s kids”, and “Why are those damned kids on my lawn?”

 It’s happened.  Apparently, I have hit middle-aged cootitude with a bang. I’m not even sure when it happened and I am pretty sure that I remember hearing people a lot older than I am saying those things when I was considerably younger.  So somehow, even when I am young(-ish), I’m still old.

I have been heard to say things like, “When I was a kid, you could still cruise The Strip in Salinas without being in the cross-fire. It was 1988, and it was a whole other world.”

 Of course, back then it made perfect sense to drive back and forth over a mile and a half of  7-11 convenience store and gas station-lined main drag, with as many of your best friends who could squeeze into the car. All while yelling out the window at no one in particular on a hot summer night. Ah, youth.

 Back then, you and your friends could pool your money and for $15.37, you could hit the Taco Bell drive-thru, fill the tank in the Chevette and go where the night takes you.

 Now, the very idea, while nostalgic, seems a terribly irresponsible waste of money, natural resources and time. Not to mention the traffic issues that was sure to have caused.

I had my turn. Now, it’s “those kids’” turn and I get to be the one who tsk-tsks at the loud group in the corner booth of the restaurant that used to be ours. But I earned it; swilling bad coffee and smoking what I thought was a sophisticated brand of cigarettes with the rest of my angst-riddled contemporaries, pontificating about the state of the world, late into the night and early morning.

 In 20 years, “today’s kids” will be all grown up and remember walking to school in torrential downpours without benefit of rain coat or umbrella, simply because it “wasn’t cool” as they force a coat onto their eye-rolling teenager.  They will shake their heads at two- sizes-too-big, low slung jeans, tiny tops that barely covered what should have been and bass so loud it shook the closed windows of cars stuck at the mercy of the same red light.

 Their kids will tire of their tales as ours have. We tell these tales not for them, but more for us; to remember. So that when we see them do these things, we can remember not so long ago, we were “those kids.”

 I will wait and watch, because I know, sooner than they think, my kids will say to their kids as they walk out the door, “…And tell tell those kids to get off our lawn.”