walkingman

My youngest has developed a love for classic heavy metal which he enjoys playing at ear splitting decibels. It is hard for me to restrain his loud playing when as a kid I also rattled the windows and shook the foundation of the house with my music. I do not want to a hypocrite and deny him the pleasures that I relished as a child and still relish to this day. I am still getting requests to turn down the volume whether it is my wife, my coworkers, my neighbors, and even at times my children. Good music is to be enjoyed and playing it low and quietly just does not work at times. Well it seems that the wife left them home alone while she ran to her school to check her classroom prior to schools opening. Junior took this occasion as an opportunity to rock the neighborhood. Unfortunately his timing was poor as we have many elderly neighbors who do not like Ozzy and Black Sabbath at any time but especially at 8 a.m. Thankfully when the police showed up our oldest son had the presence of mind to shut off the music before he answered the door. And as the cop questioned him he established that yes, he was the legal age to be left home alone and in charge of his younger and less mature brother. He assured the officer that he would inform his parents of the incident and make sure that his little brother did not disrupt the neighborhood again. Of course Junior is standing out of sight laughing at his older brothers predicament. No tickets were issued and the officer left. Calls were immediately made to Mom and I. My wife was ready to enroll Junior in military school while I had to squelch a laugh of my own. The kid is so much like me that it is scary. I can remember the same thing happening to me growing up. The only differences were I got a cop who did not like rock and wanted to scare me straight and my Mom was home. She had been and still was a hippie down deep and did not like a cop telling her how to raise her kids. She launched into a free speech thing and the cop just looked at her like she was from a different planet. It was great for a kid to watch his Mom go after a cop. I truly thought she was going to either hit him or get arrested. I think he decided that he would be better off just getting her to turn down the music rather than trying to debate her about parenting or the Constitution. I think I got my desire to fight for justice and the downtrodden from her. I used to listen to her tell the stories of her hippie days. I think Junior is going to be my rebel as well. It must be in the genes.