Empty House Reminder of Youthful Excesses

I spent the weekend alone in the house with Buddy, the wonder pooch.  I finished a thousand piece puzzle in less than two days and watched way too many movies.  Both of the kids checked in to make sure I wasn’t vegetating and I realized how much work my wife does on a normal weekend to get me ready for work on Monday.  Of course this realization was achieved because I had to do the work but it really helped fill the days.  Being in the empty house made me reminisce back to my college days when my mother would take my two younger sisters on vacation and leave my older sister and myself alone in the house for a couple of weeks each summer.  Both my older sister and I were working summer jobs to help pay for college, back when that was possible.  Since the drinking age was only 18 in those days my mother’s departure signaled a two week bacchanalia with my friends that makes me now, being a parent myself, cringe and have serious doubts as to my mother’s sanity.  But these were simpler times and my mother really did trust our basic decency.  My friends were almost as excited about my mother’s vacations as I was.  She wasn’t even safely out of town before we had moved a trashcan filled with ice and beer into the middle of the kitchen.  A couple of the friends even moved into the house now that there were empty beds.  The weekends called for epic parties that became the stuff of legend within our circle of friends.  The first year in the midst of this weekend gathering, a semi-inebriated friend leaned on a hutch that had my mother’s prized set of china.  The top half separated and fell on a circle of my sister and her friends who were playing a drinking game on the dining room floor.  One minute the house was a cacophony of noisy, boisterous college kids and the next minute you could literally hear a pin drop.  Its testimony to the innate good nature of this bunch of friends in that, even in their inebriated state, they realized this was a big deal and immediately helped my sister and I try to recover what was possible – very little of my mother’s china though.  We spent the next week awaiting our summary execution and my friends offered to stand against the wall with us.  My mother was understandably upset but not angry.  Her sadness at the loss of some prized, sentimental possessions hurt us more than if she had been truly angry.  The next summer she inexplicably trusted us again.  Shortly after the trash can full of ice and beer was safely placed in the kitchen, my friends and I disassembled the hutch to insure there would be no repeat disaster.  The party the following weekend was the best of this epoch.  It was one of those rare times when everything seemed to go right.  We had beer pong set up in the driveway and friends came from all over New England.  Two of my friends from college, hockey players, who I casually mentioned the party to actually showed up as well as a healthy word of mouth crowd from my home town.  There were easily over a hundred young people at the party and it was such a good time, filling the house, the garage and parts of the basement even.  The police showed up but only to insure we were under control. I remember concentrating so hard while talking to them – apparently successfully misleading them that I was adult enough to manage the situation.  This is once again testimony to what a great group that was because there was no damage other than to brain cells.  I remember waking up the next morning to a scene of utter disarray with bodies strewn everywhere, one of the hockey players ended up sleeping in the back yard under a bush.  He claimed he came to hinterlands of New Hampshire to camp and that was what he did.  That was really the peak of these parties.  Subsequent years did not result in the same level of sublime idiocy.  Probably, sadly, inevitably, we were actually growing up.  My friends and I talked about these parties for years, fondly remembering the adventures until I realized my own kids were starting to listen to the stories.  I do not have the same “trusting” nature of my mother even though my kids are a heck of lot more mature than I was at their age.  These parties were possible in that era because of those magnificent friends and older sister that I grew up with, something my kids, with their military brat upbringing, never had.  It’s safe to reveal some of these details on the record now that they’re through that dangerous age.  Great memories, but no beer filled trash cans in the kitchen this past weekend.



The Puzzle Completed This Weekend