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Peter Applebome
The Accidental Boy Scout

At first, I assumed it was a passing phase, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

After all, the only credible template we have for our kids’ teenage years is what happened to us--in my case, it was a cross between Leave it to Beaver and The Strawberry Statement that provided me various hazy scenarios for adolescent glory or ruin, most of them having to do with sports, music, Salingerian alienation, and girls who didn’t know I was alive.

None of these scenarios had anything to do with the absence of indoor plumbing. None included internal-frame backpacks, outback ovens, or four-season tents with front and rear vestibules. None in any shape, manner, or form touched on the tying of knots, the collective contemplation of farts, the swearing of sacred oaths, or the participation in camporees, trekorees, jamborees, or Klondike derbies. In none of them was I forced to ponder the question: What do you do if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant? In short, were I to have spent weeks in the academic exercise of imagining the course of my son’s teenage years, I would never have come up with what happened. Green hair or bad poetry, maybe. Obsessions with box scores and draft picks, probably. Whatever his generation’s version of the Beatles, Stones, Byrds, and Dylan turned out to be, almost certainly. The Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts? Do what? …

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers
Copyright 2003 by Peter Applebome