TOTALLY AWESOME
IN A GROOVY
FAR-OUT KIND OF COOL WAY,
NOT!
By Felice Prager
It’s not that we don’t have anything in common, but
he’s 17 going on 18 and I’m 21 going on 29 going on 50-something, and we are a
few generations apart. We are supposed to have different perspectives and
different outlooks on things. That’s the way it goes. However, when my son and
I are in the same vehicle, assuming none of his friends pass by in their
vehicles, call him on his cell phone, and interrupt our bonding moments, sometimes
we hit upon a subject we can talk about without one of us losing patience with
the other.
Several Saturdays ago, my son had his senior
pictures taken. I went along for the ride to make sure he showed up. He had to
sit for approximately three minutes while a photographer took six photos of him
of which we were going to pick the best photo to go into his high school
yearbook. Other parents have children who like having their pictures taken and
look forward to this. Some kids even agree to photo packages where the kid
poses wearing a letter jacket, a band uniform, or formal attire. That’s just
not my kid. If I were 17 going on 18 again, it wouldn’t be me either. My son
would rather be taking the pictures himself and the pictures would never be of
a person wearing a letter jacket or a band uniform. Somewhere in the photo, he
would have a sunset or a tree or something which stirred his creative spirit.
I’m not sure why he was so easy-going about getting
up early to do this photo thing. I think it had something to do with him
wanting to grow his Mohawk back over the summer. I think he’s smart enough to
know that a Mohawk in his senior picture was just not going to fly with his
parents. Anyway, my husband gave him a jacket, a shirt, and a tie to wear. I said
nothing about his earrings. He is who he is, and if he wants to look like a
The thing is – I like my son. He is smart, funny,
and a little bit quirky, even if he is stubborn. He must have inherited that
stubbornness from my husband because I am certainly not the stubborn type. He
has thick skin and puts up with a lot of my jabs most of the time.
While driving in my son’s black pickup truck with
his punk music being played at a surprisingly bearable volume, out of the blue,
my son said, “I hate what they’ve done to the word awesome.” Well, it wasn’t
really out of the blue. My son doesn’t do blue; he just does black. I had just
made a comment that the word cool was
a word that has been used by many generations but other words have been
single-generation words. I was scribbling down ideas in my writing notebook
which I carry with me wherever I go.
“Like groovy
and far-out were just for your hippie
generation,” he said, to which I corrected him and told him that I didn’t know
anyone, except for maybe Simon and Garfunkel who actually said they were feelin’ groovy out loud so others could
hear them. I also corrected him because I am not old enough to be part of that
hippie generation.
That’s when he made the comment about awesome. It was something I had never
really thought about, but once again, my son said something very mature and
astute - which is why I ignore the Mohawk, the earrings, and his boxers
sticking out from his sagging ripped pants.
What he said was this: “Since everything has become
totally awesome, the word awesome has lost its ability to express
anything profound. How can a something that takes your breath away be awesome if what Josh said in class was awesome and what happened at the park
was awesome and if Jen’s new haircut
is awesome and if parents and
teachers are using awesome just to
connect with their kids? Describing an
I thought it was pretty awesome that my kid came up
with that.
Then he reached behind his seat and showed me a
catalog he had gotten from a college he had been thinking about applying to.
“Read what I highlighted on the page that’s folded down,” he said.
“When I go
home, I love telling everyone where I go to college. This is an awesome school,
and it’s totally awesome being a student here.”
“I can’t go to that college,” he said.
I understood. I also understood that my son is
still learning and has a tendency to maximize that which should be ignored, so
I suggested he take things from their source. “For instance,” I said, “just
because some people overuse the word awesome,
doesn’t mean everyone does. If you hear me use it, understand that I am
referring to the real thing.”
The other night my son called on his cell phone. He was in his
bedroom. I was in the family room. He didn’t want to get up.
“I need you to come in here and read what I just wrote,” he
said.
“I’ll be there after this movie is over,” I said.
A few minutes later, my phone beeped telling me I had a text
message. We recently negotiated a deal with my son that, if he paid for it in
advance, he could have the 1000 text messages package offered by our cell phone
company. The cell phone companies are very smart doing this. First, they know
kids communicate in school with these text messages, and second, they get paid
for them twice – once outgoing and once incoming. It’s a regular racket.
The text message said,
“pleez comeer & c what i wrote.”
When I ignored that
message, a second came in: “i wuv u, mommy.”
Since I don’t know how to actually send a text message, I put
the movie on pause and walked to the scary room at the end of the hall. The
tarantula was in his cage sleeping after a three-course dinner consisting of
crickets and mealworms, and my son was sitting in the chair he bought at a
thrift shop for ten dollars because he said it spoke to him.
“It’s summer vacation,” I said. “Why are you writing?”
“I just felt like it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Read it to me.”
“The brilliant crimson sun peaked its crown over the horizon
and all that could be heard were the birds rustling in the trees, waiting to
meet the coming day. However pristine, the serenity was soon shattered by
an echoing scream, “Steven, what did you do to my alarm clock? I am going to be
late for work. Why did you take it apart?”
He continued with a very poignant essay describing his need to
know how and why things work and why things happen the way they do. I was
impressed. It was simple yet profound, and I kept thinking, “Am I being a
biased parent or is this as good as I think it is?”
When he finished, he asked, “Well, what do you think?”
“Awesome,” I said. “Totally awesome.”
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