After the football game Saturday, I was walking down State Street for a mid-afternoon burrito and a chance to watch some fool dance to hippie bongos by the Towers. I looked around and saw drunken parents stumbling out of Brats, child around their arm, slurring words about what college was like \back in the day,"" when you could take a ferry to Ogdenville for a bee (while wearing an onion, which was the style back in those days).
I suddenly realized that on the whole, parents, though they might look like puritanical, money-grubbing, corporate drones today, were really messed-up folks when they were our age. Which begs the question, how much do we really know about our parents?
I mean, sure they were the ones who didn't let you stay out late after the prom. But if you could actually go back and see them then, they might have been the ones who broke curfew because they needed to wash the car after spilling the bong water all over the back seat after that bitchin' Bay City Rollers concert. They are the ones who tell you not to spend too much when you go out, but they were probably the ones who used their allowance toward admissions to the peep show at which their buddy's older brother is a bouncer. OK, so maybe your parents weren't stoner perverts, but they still must have screwed up royally from time to time.
For instance, have you ever asked your parents how they met? They probably gave you a story like:
""Well, Katie, your mom and I met through friends and we went out to an ice cream social that night, and the rest is history.""
What really happened was:
""Well, Katie, I was walking back with my friends after getting hammered at a house party where we stole their tapper after they screwed us over on a foamy beer bong. I ran into your mom and a friend of hers, puking in an alley after drinking too many L.I.T.'s at the bar and flashing themselves to the local chapter of the Hell's Angels. One of my roommates wanted to hook up with her friend, so I had to run interference with her, three weeks later she was preggers and we got hitched in Vegas.""
I know it's really weird to think that your parents might have got hammered in their dorm room, did enough drugs to kill a small Chinese family, got more ass on one weekend than you have all semester. But it's a natural part of life, right?
Some say that knowing your parents' pasts must be pretty liberating because you know that your parents are really a lot more like you than you'd think. But then again, what will we do when we're the parents? I mean, I have friends who name their genitals ""Uncle Henry"" for chrissakes! If I'm a parent, do I tell them about my drunken nights, passing out on the bathroom floor of La Bamba's, or how I met their mother, which will probably be an embarrassing incident involving alcohol, a stolen road sign and the city of Madison's public indecency laws? I'll probably just tell them what my dad tells me when I ask him about his past:
""If you don't want to pay for tuition, you probably don't want to ask those sort of questions.""
