Driving through the generation gap

I am fully aware that I am on one side of the generation gap and my children are on the other. This past weekend that gap was illustrated over and over again causing me to think of it as less of a gap and more of a chasm, an abyss, a disparity larger than the difference between the number of people who have been informed all about Anna Nicole Smith’s life and death and the number of people who wanted to be informed about Anna Nicole Smith’s life and death.
As a birthday present my oldest daughter, Emilyjane, wanted to take a trip. So 8:00 AM Friday we packed the minivan. My first observation wasn’t so much a generation gap but rather a gap between the genders. The plan was to return home less than 48 hours after departure. I had one bag which was about the size of an overweight dachshund. Each of the three girls had bags and extras which made the minivan necessary for cargo, not just for comfort.
The first leg of the trip was a little on the short side. We went three blocks to get yet something else from one of the girl’s houses. I do not know what we needed, but I didn’t feel the need to ask, discretion being the better part of parenthood. We had been on the road a total of eighty-five seconds so when we stopped it only made sense that all three girls piled out of the van to go to the bathroom.
This trio of girls is a group any parent would be proud of, but I still don’t understand their behaviors. The first thing I noticed was symptomatic of the birth order theory of personality. One girl is an only child and proceeded to fall asleep as soon as we started rolling. It was obvious being an only child she thought it was natural to sleep on top of whatever, or in this case, whoever, was handy. My daughter is the oldest of three, so she thought it was only natural that she not be slept upon. The last girl is the baby of three children so she thought it was par for the course to have someone sleep on her. I guess it all worked out in the end.
As a father I have become very adept (or as the kids would say, I have mad skills) at closing my senses to what is going on in the back of the minivan while driving long distances. This was put to the test when it came to the radio stations the girls preferred. I had to resort to my i-Pod to keep from pulling my rapidly graying hair out of my head.
Let me give you examples of the different tastes in music and see which side you are on. My earphones were playing Sammy Davis Jr. singing “Begin the Beguine.” Here is a snippet of the lyrics: “What moments divine, what rapture serene, Till clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted, And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted, I know but too well what they mean.” Here are words that tell of love lost, words which paint pictures, words which require having scored above a 6 on your SAT’s to understand. Now a short description of what the girls were tuned to. I do not know the artist (and I use that term loosely), but it sounded like the defensive linemen from the entire NFC North were calling out the words, rather than melodiously interpreting them. These men were saying “Walk it out.” They proceeded to say it multiple times. How many times? Take the number of times any reasonable person would repeat any one phrase and then multiply by seven. You’d be close.
I was traveling with three teenage girls so of course part of our time was spent in a mall the size of a third world country. We had been inside the building, maybe three minutes, when a fully uniformed member of the Tulsa police force approached the girls. I was about five paces behind which was preferred by both them and me. The police officer asked the girls where a particular store was located. This made sense to me. If you want to know where something is in the outer reaches of the universe you ask Stephan Hawking. If you want to know the lay out of a mall you ask a teenage girl. I was about to step up and say we were from out of town so we couldn’t help, when all three girls turned and pointed to exactly where the police officer wanted to go.
It was downright eerie.