We did a lot (A LOT) of driving yesterday and since the kids slept through their assigned hour in the car, we got to listen to whatever we wanted on the radio. Phillip and I have pretty varied tastes, but one thing we can agree on is dance music, you know, thump thump club stuff. I sat there in the passenger seat listening to songs that probably everyone else knows but are new-ish to me and thinking about how they ALL sounded like the music we used to dance to in Italian discos in high school. All of it. Is American dance music 15 years behind the Europeans?
It reminded me of yet another Italian mystery novel I just finished. It was tangentially about kids and drugs in Venice, and there's a quick paragraph or two about a handful of kids who die when they leave the disco at three am and their car wraps itself around a tree.
I used to be a kid who left discos at 3am, but my dad was always there to pick me up. MY DAD. I don't know if I can explain how... shocking that sentence is, even at age thirty-one. My sisters and I have talked about it a few times (they went out WAY more than my boring self ever did) and we all have the same sort of experience. How normal it seemed then, and how radical it seems now.
People were just kind of shocked our parents let us go to the disco at ALL. And to be honest, I'm not sure why they did. It's not like they cared about what everyone ELSE got to do. I wasn't allowed to sleep over at a friend's house until my senior year of high school (though my sisters report they eased up on this once I left home.) I can't think of why they allowed me to go to discos, unless it's only because I started going as a senior (I think) and by that time they were well on their way to Once You Hit 18 You're On Your Own, and possibly because I never did ANYTHING on the weekends and they were desperate to believe I had some sort of social life. (I did not.) (I do not feel particularly damaged by that.) (Any more.) The only rule was that my dad would pick me up. He didn't even tell me when to come home. Three was just the standard going-home time.
So in Italy the discos don't even open until midnight, and until then, if you have a social life, you are hanging out in someone's bedroom putting on way too much makeup and doing your hair. I only did that a few times - most times I went with my dad to pick everyone up... oh yes! He TOOK us to the discos and he took EVERYONE ELSE. See, if you have five children, you probably own what can only be termed a Big Ass Van and this van was WELL KNOWN around base. It was called "The [Maiden Name] Bus" and many a high school boy teased my father about his vehicle. By the way, everyone thought my dad was The Awesome for providing the transportation. (Again: NO ONE drove.) (And I can't remember anyone else's parents offering, at least none of my friends' parents.) I have to say it probably improved his reputation among high school students for years.
So he'd drive A HALF HOUR AWAY, at MIDNIGHT, to drop his daughter and her weird friends in front of a GIANT DISCOTECA, where ALL MANNER of controlled substances floated around, not the least of them GROSS ITALIAN MEN. Seriously. It blows my mind that I was allowed to do this.
However. I was, I swear, one of the boringest 16 and 17-year-olds on the planet. I was also deathly afraid of my parents. I knew I liked wine (which I was allowed to drink at home every so often) but the plethora of mixed drinks at the discos (which we could LEGALLY PURCHASE) (SORT OF) were intimidating. I never ever had a drink at a disco until the night I graduated from high school, and I think I only had one then because I was feeling Extra Grown Up. Honestly, the fact that I didn't know the NAMES of the drinks was probably enough to prevent me from standing at the bar and ordering one.
There were also drugs, but this was a much fuzzier fact. I would hear, every so often, that so and so was smoking something in the parking lot, and once I was told that two guys I knew were CAMPING on this little hill outside the disco smoking inside their zipped up tent. Whatever. That did not interest me in the least and still doesn't. Perhaps my parents knew this about me.
As for BOYS oh dear. I was either intimidated by or somewhat repulsed by all the boys I KNEW - the last thing I wanted was some drunk Italian dude dancing around me. Which almost never happened anyway, because 1) my friends were cuter than me and 2) I have a pretty powerful Stand Offish vibe that did not bode well for my dating career. (I didn't have one. I married the first boy I fell in love with in college. SNORE!)
And then, at three am, we tumbled out of the disco, smelling like ashtrays, and piled into my dad's van to be ferried home.
I don't know. We used to think that our parents had somehow come to their senses. Look at them allowing us to do something COOL! Sure, I wasn't allowed to sleep over at my best friend's house when I was eleven and she lived down the street and her parents WERE FRIENDS OF MY PARENTS, but now I get to dance all night in a disco in a foreign country AND THEY DRIVE US?! Awesome!
Of course, now I realize that my parents WANTED us to have fun and there really weren't a lot of ways to have any. Everyone lived so far away from each other, no one could drive, and discos really were The Thing. Everyone went. Everyone had awesome times. And my dad was only making sure we didn't end up wrapped around a tree. I'm not sure how this didn't occur to me then.
My dad is retired. He likes to read stacks and stacks of Military and History and Military History and Occasional Current Event-Ish books, and when he's not doing that he's reading financial blogs on his iPad. We often tease him with that "I must have my Library!" line from Pride and Prejudice. He naps. My kids exhaust him. And he was just this way when I was in high school, only then it was his own kids (and the ones he taught) exhausting him. This is the man that stayed up till midnight to drive us to the disco, and woke up with an alarm at three to pick us up again.
Since I've become a parent I've spent some time revising my personal history, realizing that horrible terrible awful things my parents did to me were probably things that saved me from various Pits of Despair and Uncomfortable Spots. I EASILY see myself making the same parenting choices. No way my kids are going to STAY THE NIGHT anywhere except MY OWN HOUSE!!! And that's FINAL! But then I also see the ways they let us out, but safely, and at personal cost. I always assumed they fell straight asleep as soon as I was gone, but when I think about my own kids doing that? I'm sure I'll be sitting up in the rocking chair biting my nails and watching infomercials till they get home.