America - You're Grounded!

 When it comes to addressing the current health crisis, citizens are hearing terms like social distancing, staying in place and self-quarantining.  Apparently, in a twist of fate, children are now demanding that their elderly parents stay home. 

The virus outbreak and attempts to slow it down are serious business which is why I offer one piece of advice.  Tell all the people “they’re grounded!”  It’s a phrase that every person over the age of 15 should clearly understand.  They should know the rules and put up little argument if they don’t want to be double grounded.

Grounding was a fairly common occurrence in the Carroll household although my wife Ann insists that she spent the better part of her high school years being grounded for various infractions.

In my case, grounding was usually the outcome of a privilege gone wrong.  “You can go to the movies but be home by 10,” said my mother.  It was a simple request that was stretched or completely ignored by my teenage self.

Getting grounded after a Friday night infraction was a bad choice because it meant spending the entire weekend at home.  Saturday night missteps kept me home on Sunday but that wasn’t so bad.  Once I even tried to negotiate my way out of church on Sunday morning because I was grounded.  My motion was denied.

Grounding was sometimes accompanied by forced labor.  As judge and jury, my father might ground me, but my mother would add a distasteful task onto it like mowing the yard or picking weeds.  I once clipped four quarters from my mother’s coin jar to buy some Matchbox cars.  I got caught and had to pick 50 weeds.  I even tried to rip them in half, but moms know about these things – busted again.

Of course, when grounding fell across a really important event like a friend’s birthday, I might complain and moan for a few days. Then I’d make my pitch to pick weeds or wash the car in lieu of being grounded.  I saw it more as a work release program.

Grounding was especially painful when the keys to the family car were involved.  It was more painful losing access to the car than sitting around the house when I was 17.   The guy with the car got to call all the shots.  The guy without one got the back seat, literally.

Of course, breaking curfew was only one path to grounding.  I talked back, stretched the truth about my homework on a few occasions and came home from the prom at 7 a.m. but that’s a story for another day.

The big difference between today’s “stay in place” and yesterday’s grounding is that no one is being punished in 2020.  In fact, we are being asked to ground ourselves to help others.  It’s a hard concept for some to understand – so maybe having Governor Abbott release a statement that everyone in the state is grounded will do the trick.  Hang in here Allen!

Our Mysterious Garage

 

I don’t think there was a place in my home more fascinating and scarier than the garage. 

Folks didn’t walk out of the kitchen into the garage in the old days – they walked across the yard to what we now call the “detached garage.”  Whether it sat at the end of a long farm driveway or backed up to a creepy alley in the city, the garage was one place you didn’t mess around – until you were old enough to mess around that is.

Our family garage could have doubled as a horror movie set.  Old dangerous tools hung on the walls, while jugs of weird chemicals and rusted paint cans lined the shelves.  The place always smelled like seasoned wood and old oil because there were stacks of old wood and oil cans around the floor. The only thing missing was a car. The garage was built in the 1920’s and was perfectly sized for a Model T, not a twenty foot ‘65 Bonneville.

The garage was a place that came with very specific instructions when we were small: don’t go in there without mom or dad. I had no problem with that because the place creeped me out. 

The garage was different though because there was cool stuff among the creepy stuff.  There were beach umbrellas, old baseball bats, an old push lawnmower and a set of wooden skis that my father last used in the late 40’s.

As we got older, it was also a place that we stored bicycles. We performed maintenance work on them with old rusty tools and a greasy oil can that popped on the bottom and squirted dirty oil out the spout.  In the days before WD40, it was the best we had.

Nothing ever seemed to leave the garage.  Sacks of concrete mix had become blocks of cement and potting soil had weeds growing out of the package.

Again, as my brother and I got older, a plywood go-kart with a Briggs and Stratton upright lawnmower pushed the bicycles aside. Instead of a forbidden zone, it became a place to hang out away from the parents.

Then, my friend and I played a game called “I wonder if it will burn.” We put a match to a broken old canvas chair and it burst into flames.  I can’t imagine what we were thinking but burning down the family garage was not on the list.  We dumped a 50 lb. sack of peat moss on the chair and the fire got snuffed out.  We cleaned up the mess and threw the chair in the garbage. If dad hadn’t found a burned chair in the trash can, it would have been the perfect crime – it wasn’t.

Again, years later, my parents had both passed away and I found myself faced with a task familiar to many baby boomers – cleaning out the parent’s house.

Hazardous or not, I dumped all of the paint cans and chemicals into the trash.  I kept the skis for no reason and sold the remaining contents “as is” with the house.  I forgot to tell them about the 150 lb. sack of concrete.

If you grew up with a garage in the yard, you know what I mean when I say it was fascinating and creepy at the same time.  It’s the smell I still recall though. That mixture of old wood and oil and pesticides. Ah, the good old days.