Commentary: In The Fast Lane To Happiness

Most of the time, if you're at least as fortunate as I've been, your children will do things that fill you with wonder, awe, amazement and pride. It helps, of course, if your bar for wonder, awe, amazement and pride is pretty low. But the fact remains that, most of the time, they will at least live up to your expectations, if not your dreams. And in the parenting business, close enough is good enough.

However, every now and then, they will, shall we say, miss the mark. Sometimes by just a little, sometimes they won't even be pointed in the same direction as the mark. The point is, they're going to screw up. Prepare yourself.

Bottom line, at some point, your kid is going to hit a baseball through the stained glass window of life, and chances are, you're going to be one with the broom and dustpan, cleaning up the mess.

My youngest daughter got a ticket during spring break.

OK, so that's not exactly the end of the world. Heck, it wasn't even the end of spring break, despite our threats to have her spend the rest of the time with us, in deep meditation about the ramifications of a life of crime for which she was surely headed. I mean, we couldn't even keep that up very long, and we had one of our kids convinced the Tooth Fairy was real until he was a teenager. Of course, it could have been the dollar.

Anyway, she got a ticket. Obviously it was such a devastating experience for her that she almost forgot to sign her name with a heart over the "i" in "Smith." Almost. When this bit of calligraphic irony was pointed out to her, she said there were lots of people with her last name and she wanted to stand out.

Yes, that's exactly what you want to do when receiving a traffic citation. Stand out.

OK, so now you know what I'm dealing with here. It's not that she doesn't take things like this seriously. It's that it's entirely possible my youngest daughter is the single happiest person in the world. When you doubt this, I want you to stop and think: She signed her ticket with a heart. She won't say, but she probably complemented the officer on those cool mirrored shades and told him to have a nice day. In years to come, if she signs her tax return with a heart she'll be the human version of Prozac.

Of course, this isn't her first brush with the law. Just after we got her a car, we came home to find her in the fetal position on the living room sofa. That in itself wasn't unusual, but since she didn't have a bowl of soup and an infinite loop of "Pretty Little Liars" on the TV, we knew something was wrong.

That's when we discovered the police had opted against suspending their usual insistence on not speeding in a school zone, even in the face of a dire emergency like having to go home to get a dance team uniform she had forgotten to pack.

As with most things in my daughter's life, this story has a happy ending. Our city wisely allows first-time offenders to participate in a program that leans heavily on community service. As a result, she elected to spend some time working at a local animal rescue shelter, despite the horrible assurances from her friends that she, like people they knew, would be cleaning up acres of dog waste and hauling around pet food bags at least twice as heavy as she was.

Instead, because she is the happiest person in the world and there is some karma to life, she spent the morning "socializing" a group of young dachshunds. Yes, she paid her debt to society by playing with puppies.

When I seemed incredulous about this, she said, slightly indignantly, that wasn't all she did. She also had to play with some kittens. Like Waylon and Johnny said, there ain't no good chain gang.

There was, of course, more to the story. At our insistence and with the belief that she was going to have to pay a hefty fine, she went out and got a job. And although it was, basically, cleaning up after her friends when they came in to get yogurt, she was there every day, on time, and worked her entire shift with a smile her face. Because, you know, happiest person in the world.

Yep, sometimes your kids will amaze you. Like when they sign their name with a heart. And walk off with yours.

Commentary on 04/10/2014

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