The day old Pop Mannion finally tied one on

You've all probably heard about the 4 year old kid who drove his mom's car to the video store the other night.  Those of you who are parents of small children probably didn't find this story as amusing as those of you whose kids are grown (and who have other kinds of nightmares now) and those of you who don't have kids and so have never worried about the possibilty of the little tykes deciding to run an errand all on their own.

Taking the car for a midnight joy ride is a new one.  But most little kids manage an escape now and then.  The blonde's brother was the Steve McQueen of toddlers.  He broke jail once or twice a day, no matter how tightly his mother thought she had him locked up.

When he was not quite 2, our 11 year old's favorite errand to run with either of his parents was to the local drugstore, Fay's.  Whenever we put him in the car he would ask hopefully, "Shop Fay's?"  One morning, he got out of the house with both his mother and father right there and supposedly keeping vigilant eyes on him.  He made it up to the corner where a watchful neighbor intercepted him.  He was carrying one of the blonde's credit cards, his plan clearly to "shop Fay's."

And his brother, when he was around 2, decided to go for a long explore one bright sunny Saturday afternoon.  This happened on my watch.  The blonde was at work.  Again, I was right there.  We were in the backyard, the kid was playing in the sandbox, and I was close at hand, pushing his brother on the swing.  I was standing so that the sandbox was in my line of sight, but for some reason I took my eyes off him for a minute, and when I looked back, he was gone.

I made the mistake of assuming he'd wandered inside to use the potty.  By the time I'd torn the whole house apart and searched the neighbors' backyards and rounded up some of the neighborhood kids to help me go hunting for him, 15 minutes had gone by with no sign of him.  I called the cops.

The blonde, who as many of you know is a newspaper editor, was at her desk, editing her heart out, with the police scanner on in the background.  She heard the call go out, alerting patrol cars to be on the lookout for a blond 2 year old boy and even noted that the area where the kid had gone missing was our neighborhood, but she didn't put two and two together.  She simply felt bad for the missing boy's parents, who she observed to a colleague were probably going nuts with fear and worry at the moment.

Well, as a matter of fact, I was.

Fortunately, Jack had only gone up to the top of the street, a long walk for a two year old, and all up a steep hill, but it meant he was in somebody's front yard the whole way and eventually a sharp-eyed mom spotted him, assumed he was a fugitive, got him turned around, and herded him home.

When I was a pre-schooler a friend and I once chased after a dog we were convinced was Lassie.  We followed her across the cow pasture behind our house and deep into the woods on the far side of the farm.  We were gone for what my mother insists to this day was hours, although based on how it felt when our guys pulled their vanishing acts it might have been no more than 30 minutes.

And when I was 4 or 5 I took our car for a joy ride.

It was early in the morning, on what must have been the weekend because all the dads in the neighborhood were home, including Pop Mannion.   I was playing with my friend Arthur, who lived directly across the street from us.  We were playing cops and robbers.  We were both the cops.  We got a call from dispatch that a bank had been robbed.  Naturally, we jumped into our squad car.

Arthur got behind the wheel.  I insist on this fact.  I want you to know I knew better than to do what he did.  He threw the car into gear.  Our driveway sloped steeply down to the street.  We got rolling pretty fast.  Being a precocious young tyke, with nerves of steel, I had enough presence of mind to try to stop the car by reaching over to grab the stick shift and throw the car back into what I thought was park, but Arthur had apparently put it in neutral and so shifting into reverse didn't help us all that much.

I don't remember being scared or even worried.  I may have been laughing too hard, because what I remember most clearly from the adventure is the sight of my father barrelling out our front door in his pajamas and charging down the driveway after us, with a look of red-faced horror on his face.

Even when he was 30 my dad did not move that fast.  The only way he could have been coming out the door while we were still rolling down the driveway is if my mother had spotted Arthur and me playing in the car and sent him to haul us out before we could do what we'd already done.  So it was a matter of lucky timing that he was actually there to chase us down the driveway and out into the street.  But he did it and, another matter of lucky timing, Arthur's dad happened to pick that moment to come to his front window with his coffee, and what Arthur's dad saw was his staid and sober neighbor Ed Mannion, in his pajamas, running after his unoccupied Chevy as it rolled merrily away from him.  The sight made Arthur's dad laugh so hard he spit out his coffee.  My dad was a strict Pepsi only man in John Cheever country, a soda-totaller among drinkers of highballs and cocktails, and Arthur's dad assumed that he had caught my father taking the plunge at last.

He yelled for his wife.  "Honey, honey, come quick!  You got to see it!  Ed Mannion finally tied one on!"

You can imagine that he was a little less amused to see the car roll up onto his front lawn and found it even less funny when the supposedly soused Pop Mannion reached the car, yanked open the door, and dragged two little kids out of the front seat, one of whom was his own pride and joy.

No point to this post.  Just reminiscing.  But I wonder.

What do you think that four year old would have done if the video store had been open when he got there?

I'm betting that along with his mom's keys he'd also taken her Blockbuster card.

Comments

[Sovereign Eye]

He would have headed straight for the candy.

[Sovereign Eye]

PS It is a fact: Any kid who graduates high school with a perfect K-12 attendance record, will, sooner or later, be found in San Francisco, running a leather boutique that caters to the S&M crowd.

[Greg]

Great story.

When I was 8 or 10 or so, the family took the train to Washington D.C. for vacation. I remember going to the back car in the Pittsburgh yards to watch them add a dining car. I waited and waited and waited, but the diner was never added. So I retreated, only to see our train rolling down the tracks without me. I took off running after it. Somebody in a tower must have seen me and alerted the train to stop. When I caught up to it, the conductor who'd told me about the diner was waiting at the open door. He said "I won't tell anyone if you won't".
Never mentioned it 'till now.