Driving me crazy

My 16-year-old is driving now. Not just driving me crazy, but driving his own car. Well, it’s my car, but I’m letting him drive it.

Now we have four drivers at the house, which means my monthly car insurance costs are roughly equivalent to the Obamacare health reform bill. Car insurance is apparently so high because they spend $800 billion dollars a month on TV commercials. That should be your priority, mister president. Get Flo from Progressive off my TV.

The other day my son informed me that he was going over to some girl’s house. I asked him who all was going to be there, and he said two girls, and him, and another boy. Oh, he added, and her mother.

So as he was leaving, I said, “Can you leave me the mother’s phone number? You know, just in case I need to call her.” He looked at me kind of incredulously, and then he said, “Why, you don’t trust me?”

Well, that was an easy one. “No,” I said.

He wanted to know why I didn’t trust him. That’s another easy one. He’s a 16-year-old boy. I used to be one. I know what they do.

Now, in truth, other than mental anguish, my two teenagers have not caused me much trouble so far. No arrests, no lawsuits, no TV news crews on my front lawn or subpoenas or calls from the producers of the Maury Povich Show asking me to sign a waiver. But you have to keep an eye on them, especially boys.

They’re great when you’re teaching them to drive. They keep both hands on the wheel, they pay attention to what you say, they don’t turn the radio on, and they are very careful about everything they’re doing. But let this be a warning to all parents – it’s a lie. When you’re out of the picture, all bets are off.

I was standing in my driveway one day and I thought, why is a jet plane landing in my neighborhood? Then I realized it was my daughter coming down the road at Daytona 500 speed. I half-expected to see police cars chasing her and a TV news helicopter flying overhead. We had a “talk” and she doesn’t do that anymore, at least not when she thinks I might be able to see her.

We now have four cars at my house, none in the garage. We could do like our trashy neighbors and just park all over the lawn, but instead we have a game of musical chairs every night or morning trying to get us all lined up, like airplanes on a runway. The other morning I went out to my son’s car so I could get out, and when I put the key in the ignition I got quite a shock, as his stereo was turned up to 11 and I got blasted by an ear-splitting rap song. I looked like Wil E. Coyote after he accidentally electrocutes himself. Again, we had a “talk”, once I regained consciousness.

He has one key for his car, and I’ve suggested about, oh, a trillion times that he should go get an extra key made. When I say that, or pretty much anything, here’s what he hears: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. So of course, I was right in the way that dads inevitably are, and I got a phone call Sunday afternoon that he had locked his keys in his car. Luckily for him, he was at the church at the time, and my reaction when I got there was somewhat muted.

You can’t break into these newer cars as easily as you could back in my day, so I had to call a locksmith, who came right away because we were at our church and gave us a discount because, in his words, we were “good Christian people.” Luckily, he could not read my mind at the time, or he might have come to a different conclusion.