Idiot ... I mean, Indian summer

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As I rolled my charcoal grill to the driveway’s edge, I looked up just in time. Whoosh! Within inches of me, he streaked past, a smear of white T-shirt and blue jeans, all awkward feet and knees pumping at the pedals of his tricked-out chrome bicycle.

It was the Indian summer Kid.

The Kid careened up the street to the end of my subdivision. Then, without slowing or looking (and with both hands off his bike’s handlebars), he shot across the crest of the dreaded “Spring Valley Curves” on U.S. 6.

This happened at 5 p.m., the time of day when the curves are a nuclear accelerator of speeding traffic. The Kid didn’t care; he didn’t even notice the cars and trucks raging past as he crossed the highway.

He was too busy fielding a text message on his cell phone.

Mercifully, nothing happened to the Indian summer Kid. I’m writing about him only because he’s a bit player in a renaissance of kid foolishness I’ve noticed lately. And I think I know why.

It’s fall; Back to School. All that matters to youngins’ is being OUTSIDE.

Autumn Youth Advisory: The teen that just ramped your car with a skateboard can’t hear your shrieked obscenities. He’s wearing an iPod. Plus, it’s Indian summer; he’s busy chasing elusive bumblebees of freedom.   

“Lately these kids are heedless and erratic as deer in the rut,” I raved to my neighbor the other day.   

My neighbor (who’s as flappable as John Wayne) muttered something dry, like, “Wait ‘til Halloween ... wild zombies everywhere.”

Wild zombies, indeed. Like the lanky junior high kid I nearly smacked with my pickup truck last week. He was out “exercising.” (Read: he was chasing a rabbit through one of Princeton’s neighborhoods while his friends cheered from a nearby porch.)

The chase was going well for Rabbit Boy until his cotton-tailed quarry juked left and skittered across the street. Then things unraveled.

Unable to throw the brakes on his size 14s, Rabbit Boy flew into an ungainly, slow-motion jumping jack. Then he snagged a leg on a plastic realty sign staked by the curb, and into the street he pinwheeled.

After I avoided tragedy (and ground about 10,000 miles from my truck’s brake pads), I considered scolding Rabbit Boy. No point, I decided, thinking back to my days as a teenage hedonist.

Back then (circa 1995), Indian summer owned me as much as I owned it. I was invincible, a lunatic of dust and fading sun tan. I was “Dude surfin’ on top of a Chevy station wagon.”      

This weekend, it’ll (hopefully) be sunny and faded blue. And as we adults make the 10 a.m. drive from the hardware store to the doughnut shop, we’ll peer down leaf-strewn, eerily kid-free streets.

“Huh,” we’ll wonder. “Where has sweet youth gone?”

Just then, we’ll see that neighbor kid with the Mohawk hairdo. There he’ll be — sliding across a garden hose-soaked lawn, in an apparent attempt to “Karate-jump” his kid sister’s empty wading pool. With kid sister sitting in the pool.

As we crane our neck to view this grand exhibition of idiocy, we’ll nearly run over the Indian summer Kid, who’s shuffling backwards across traffic with a camcorder in his palm.

Seems the Kid was filming Mohawk Boy’s big stunt for YouTube – but now he’s filming the grill of our oncoming Dodge.

Honk! Screech! The Indian summer Kid will dive, rolling out of the way. Up he’ll pop, with a dazed smile. He’s OK; so is his camcorder, along with the rest of the universe.

“Crazy autumn drivers,” he’ll think as he bounds off into the morning.   

And we’ll be thankful we had all summer to learn to drive with both feet on the brakes.

Neil Johnson resides in Spring Valley. He can be reached at neiljohn17@yahoo.com.

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