It's A Miracle I'm Still Alive

Here in Michigan, legistators are considering a law that would make it illegal for adults to smoke in cars with children inside.

My first reaction was "That's a stupid law. What parent would smoke in the car with their children?" But the immediate response to my own question was "my father." I don't think I have a childhood memory of my father that didn't have him smoking. Or asleep. Sometimes both.

There's no question that my father would ignore this law. He'd hide his lit cigarette in my lap until the police drove past. I don't know if second hand smoke causes cancer or not. I do know, however, that I have the lung capacity of an 80 year old.

But it's not just my father's incessant smoking that put me at risk. There are a number of things that my parents did while I was growing up that would get them locked up today.

Like car seats. They didn't have car seats (or at least my parents didn't) when I was a child. In fact, I remember being two or three and sitting in the back of my father's MGB.

This isn't a picture of my father's car, but I wanted to show you what I'm talking about. Notice that the car is a two-seater. That's right, it wasn't until I was older that I realize that my parents had stuffed me behind their car seats like an old CD case. And my father has always used his horn in lieu of his brakes while driving.

Speaking of driving, I recall an incident where I "fell" out of my mother's car when I was three. I remember falling out of the car, seeing the street, seeing the sky, seeing the street, seeing the sky, then finally just seeing the street.

I didn't start wearing a seat belt until I took driver's ed. Until then, my seat belt was my mother's arm. Whenever she had to make a sudden stop, she'd reach over to hold me in the seat, I guess to keep me from flying through the windshield.

You know how parents are being arrested now for leaving their children in cars unattended? Everytime my mother went to the grocery store, she'd leave me in the car so that she could actually get her shopping done without my interference. It could be the hottest day of the year, but she'd only crack the window, evidently preferring my brain to cook in my skull than bother her by pleading for Pop-Tarts.

I've supressed a lot of these memories but every now and then one resurfaces. A couple of years ago I woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that during the first and second grade, I walked, unsupervised, a mile or so from school to my aunt's house. My aunt ran an in-home day care. Her idea of child development was to have us sit on her couch motionless and without making a sound while she watched her "stories." If we fidgeted or made too much noise, she'd tell us that we were acting like a bunch of idiots. I used to tell myself that she really meant "Indians." Even then, my defense mechanisms were fully functional.

But I digress. Did I mention that this was in Detroit? Or that I was a year ahead of my age class? This means at the age of five, I walked unsupervised down a busy street in a city mostly known for civil unrest.

I called my mother the next day.

"Mom, you and dad let me walk by myself from school when we lived in Detroit."

"No, we didn't. I used to pick you up from school"

"Not all the time, I remember walking to Auntie's house afterschool until you got off work. I was only five! What we're you thinking?"

(pausing) "Well things we're different back then. It's not like now."

"Oh yeah, Detroit was an idyllic pastoral wonderland back then."

I've come to the conclusion that back then parents weren't that attached to their kids.

Or at least mine weren't.