You'll Never Find...

When my boys aren't making me mad about something, they crack me up with their ideas of teenage romance.
This morning I was greeted with rain and 43 degrees. I decided to forego a cold, wet run. Instead, I took Spencer's car to put some gas in it. He told me that he had scraped together $2 in nickels and quarters the night before to put gas in the car. We give him $20 a week for gas so he can drive to school and to basketball practice with occasional forays over to Ohio State or to The Men's Wearhouse to order his tux.
That seemed like plenty of money for gas until prices shot up to $4.19 per gallon.
As I stopped at a stop sign, I heard things clinking. I thought maybe empty bottles were under the car seat. Another stop and another clink made me open the console betweeen the seats.
There, I found an aluminum bottle of Old Spice body spray -- a necessity for teenage boys.
The next item puzzled me. Two votive candles in glass candleholders.
When I got home, as the boys were scrambling to get out the door on time, I asked Spencer why the candles.
"I set them down in the sunken area and light them," he said. "Adds a little ambiance."
"While you're driving?" I ask.
"No, when I'm parked at the turf or the school lot."
I know that the high schoolers hang around their cars on weekend nights and I tried to picture Spencer with his flickering candlelight.
I told him he was definitely in competition with his father who had sculpted shag in his van as a teenager.
Then I suggested that candles and cars don't really mix that well since cars are highly flammable.
"Yeah, I gotta get rid of those," he agreed.
There goes the romantic candlelight when sitting in the middle of the school parking lot surrounded by other teenagers. I guess they'll have to fallback on Plan B -- a portable strobe light that they ordered from Best Buy.
"Are you sure we can't use it while we drive around?" he asked.
"Pretty sure."

Legacies

At the basketball scrimmage on Saturday, two parents asked who "that number 18" was. That was Spencer. They asked because they didn't recognize him, even though they'd sat beside me at games last year and invited Spencer into their homes for meals. Since basketball season ended in April, Spence has put on about 30 pounds of muscle.
"He was so skinny last year," one of the mothers said, explaining why she hadn't recognized him.
It's true. When I saw him around the house, I thought he was normal sized. Tall, but normal weight. When I saw him on the basketball court, I realized he was a stick figure.
Not this year though.
Adding to the confusion of his appearance is a recent haircut.
A senior on the team, short with a bald spot, told Spencer that he has an athletic body but a pretty boy haircut. Spencer trotted off to the barber for a "high and tight" cut to go with his athletic body. I'm not sure who made this senior boy fashion arbiter.
Spencer does have pretty boy hair. It's thick and smooth. And he still has a baby face.
The short haircut took care of that. Now he looks like a man.
Something about the haircut reminded me of my dad in his high school days, so Mom sent me some pictures.
People have always said that Spencer and my dad look alike because of the blue eyes and the square chin. I thought the haircut might add to the similarities, but now that I compare. I'm not sure. What do you think?
Here's Dad's senior picture and one from when he was Spencer's age.
The other thing about Dad and Spencer is they are both basketball fanatics. Dad didn't even hold a basketball until 8th grade but then excelled. He was offered a basketball scholarship to a college in Kentucky but turned it down to start working after graduation.
He has continued to play though, in a senior league and teaching his grandsons his hook shot until a shoulder injury a few years ago.
"You can just tell Gran was good at basketball," Spencer said when he looked at the picture my mom had sent.
As he flipped through the pictures, he looked at the one of my mom and dad together in high school. "People don't really marry people from high school, do they?" he asked.
But, of course, they do and they did more frequently in the past, like his grandparents who met when they were in high school, when they were both still baby faced and had no idea that their future would lead to four children and seven grandchildren.
Maybe the story of high school sweethearts is a different story though, one that I'll have to tell about Tucker someday as he tries to reconcile now with the on-again, off-again girlfriend