Dave Barry on his teen child. Teenager at Large The last thing I said to my teenage son as I put him on the plane for Europe was Don’t lose your passport!. The second last thing I said was Don’t lose your passport!. In fact if I was to analyse all the statements I made to my son in the week before his departure, they’d boil down to Don’t lose your passport!. The message I was trying to convey was that he should not lose his passport. Not that he needed to be told this. He’s a teenage boy, and teenage boys already know everything. When a boy reaches 13, the Knowledge Fairy inserts into his brain all the information in the entire universe. From that point on, he no longer needs any parental guidance. All he needs is parental money. This is why a teenage boy who’s had a driver’s licence for two hours knows that he can drive 267 kilometres an hour in heavy traffic, while devoting two percent of his attention to the actual road and 98 percent to the critical task of adjusting the radio to exactly the right volume setting. If you criticise him, he’ll give you a look of contempt mixed with pity. Because you are a clueless old nerd who was last visited by the Knowledge Fairy in 1873, and your brain has been leaking information ever since. And so, when I told my son, as he got on to the plane, not to lose his passport, he rolled his eyes in the way that knowledgeable teenagers have rolled their eyes at their parents since Romeo and Juliet rolled their eyes at their parents for opposing a relationship that turned out really swell except that they wound up fatally stabbed and poisoning themselves. At this point, you veteran parents are asking, So, when did your son lose his passport? The answer is, Before he legally got into Europe. He may have set an Olympic record for passport losing, because apparently his was stolen, along with all his traveller’s cheques, while he was on the plane. Don’t ask me how this could happen. My son has tried to explain it to me, but I still don’t understand, because I have a leaky old brain. All I know is that when the plane landed, my son had no passport and almost no money. Fortunately, the plane landed in Germany, a care-free laid-back nation that’s not a big stickler for paperwork. I am, of course, kidding. The national sport in Germany is stickling. So my son spent a number of hours trying to convince various authorities that he was a legal human. Meanwhile, back in the United States, unaware of what had happened, I exchanged increasingly frantic telephone calls with the mother of the boy my son was supposed to meet at Frankfort airport, who had reported back to her that my son had not arrived. The mother had suggested several things that her son could do, such as have my son paged or ask an authority, but of course her son scoffed at these ideas because he is also a teenage boy and did not need to be told how to find somebody in a large, unfamiliar airport. He preferred the time-tested technique of wandering about aimlessly. His mother, who also has a daughter, assured me that girls don’t act this way. Eight fun-filled and relaxing hours after his plane landed, my son finally called me. I nearly bit my tongue off not telling him I Told You So!. He told me that the Germans had graciously agreed not to send him back to Miami, which is good, because he would probably have ended up in Kuala Lumpur. He got a new passport the next day, but replacing traveller’s cheques was not so simple. I will not name the brand of traveller’s cheques involved, except to say that it rhymes with Wisa. As I write these words, my son and I have both been calling the Wisa people for a week, and they still haven’t given us a Final Answer on whether they’ll replace the cheques. It says on the Wisa website that you can easily get a refund if your cheques are lost or stolen, but in my son’s case it is apparently going to require a vote of the full United Nations. For security and convenience, my son would have been better off carrying his wealth in the form of cattle. But never mind that. The main thing is, he’s safely and legally in Europe, where he and his friend will be backpacking for a month, relying on their common sense. So if there’s a war you’ll know why.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 07:37:53 +0000
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