"Last week, on pure impulse, I drove to my office with my seat belt unfastened. I just did it. Just for the cheap thrill of it. I ignored the warning buzzer. It made me feel young again. I never told anyone this. You're the first."

Ah, that's genius, Garrison Keillor.

Can I come over?

Thank you, Mr. Keillor. I inhaled memories while reading this essay.

Dutifully purchasing the only 5-point harness carseat on the market for my first child only to have him outgrow it and out weigh (30 lbs before 12 months) it before he was 2 years old.

Stopping a non-english speaking family with a standing infant in the back seat in the middle of city traffic and giving them the carseat...demonstrating to them by hand gestures how to use the !@#$ thing!

Hiding my cigarettes in my car when said firstborn was 14 and probably already smoking....

My second child, merely 4 years younger, never tasted whole milk, hamburger, salted or sweetened food, french fries in the home, or fried or scrambled eggs. She doesn't eat piecrust. At Thanksgiving she scrapes the filling out of the pie. Is that her loss or my failure?

The youngest by 12 years and my last (I can state with complete assurance) child is programmed for babysitting, daycare & daycamp; piano, violin & flute lessons; dance, soccer, basketball, sewing and even engineering lessons and possible overnight camp. She knew how to buckle her own carseat at an embarassingly young age and has graduated from the various stages and legal parameters of location in the moving vehicle with alarming equanimity. She has two helmets.

Cigarettes are no longer in my vernacular. I so miss inhaling.

Thanks for the memories.

p.s.

I really appreciate your essays.

really lovely. Thank you for the smiles of recognition.

I recoil in horror at the fact that my very loving but laissez-faire mom would just holler at us to "Go out and play!" and we did, from dawn to dusk. If I did that now, I'd be in jail. And yet, we survived. Not just survived, but had a great time. I hate hovering! Hate it! But it's almost mandated these days. I rejoiced when my kid had to get stitches in his hand - rejoiced that the day camp he went to left the little buggers to themselves long enough to fashion a war between the girls and the boys (the boys lost! and our son was a casualty in the gender wars - a lttle girl pushed him down in the crick). I mean, if he'd broken his neck, I wouldn't be this sanguine, of course. But thank god they let them just "Go outside and play!" PS: Say, GK, I'm gonna go see you in a movie this weekend! =)

at a new restaurant then returned to the table with my friend. The bathroom door was within sight and the kid's been wiping herself for a number of years now. "Do you think you should sit here?" The friend asked. "You never know what could happen."

I had such lovely adventures when I was a kid and nobody else--no grown-ups, anyway--knew what was happening. Catching crawdads and guppies in drainage ditches, riding my bike to the dime store to buy chocolates from the candy counter, building a fort out behind the shed with old pieces of wood that were just lying around (no doubt with rusty nails in them, too) and rummaging around the attic, finding old records, old love letters, old clothes and already-wrapped Christmas presents. Sometimes I could weep for the liberty my child lacks. Could the smokes and the gin set us both free?

Oh, Garrison, how well I remember (I'm a couple of years older than you) taking my small children in their little "car seats"--little hammocks of canvas slung between two soft-metal hooks over the back of the front seat, with a plastic tray and some "toys" (maybe a toy steering wheel) in front of the child. My God! Such a device would get us arrested now!

I am so grateful, now, that my beautiful little granddaughter only rides in a special car seat, in the back seat, strapped in, facing toward the back, with her mother strapped in the back seat facing her, attentive to her every need.

BTW, when my children were small, we lived in Lake Wobegon... that is, we lived on a farm near a very small town in MN. So, even tho I'm a native of California, I well know life in small-town, farming communities in your state. Bless you!

That was beautiful! I have just one child right now, who never lets me forget about seatbelts, but like you there are those days, its just that instead of Sinatra, I long for locking myself in the garage with smokes, a half pint of vodka and the Dead Kennedys.

Wonderful article - thanks for writing. Actually, I refuse to give up the old ways - I'm smoking, swilling rich coffee with cream and looking forward to my breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, real butter and thick buttermilk pancakes. We are all going to die, even with all the rules and sacrifices and efforts to the contrary - so stop worrying, and get some enjoyment out of life instead.

I remember them well - Dad smoking in the car as I rode up front - no seat belt - no fear - as someone else said, outside barefooted from dawn to dusk - and even after dusk, running with the neighborhood kids - baseball in a now-developed field that houses condos (not really, but soon, I'm sure) - now I can't even afford to live in the town in which I was raised- and I sure as hell got out of there ASAP, but the way Keillor says it, I could go back and be a kid again - and my folks would be young, and we'd have hamburgers on the grill and my dad could have that fat Jack Daniels on ice while smoking a cigarette!

My morning ritual: Get up, make strong coffee, and read Salon before I go to work. I always go to your articles first when I see them (Cary gets second place on those days :).....What a gorgeous way to begin the day! I remember too......thank you for writing this! I will now go off to work, smiling happily as I drive, and the traffic won't bother me at all this morning....