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living thirty feet from us, and he looked at me like I’d just ordered him off a cliff. “I took my parents to the airport this morning,” he said. “Their flight leaves tomorrow.”
    Others asked how it would work. We didn’t know.
    One said, “I hope we can do the same one day. Congratulations!”
    I told him, “Don’t congratulate me. I have a doctorate in selfishness, but every once in a while I experience a momentary lapse.”

    Eleven months later the house was complete, and we set about making it a home. It took a three-hour yard sale one Saturday to sell the stuff my parents had spent a lifetime gathering. “Junk,” Dad insisted, but I could tell he had trouble letting some of it go.
    Those were golden times. Every week or two we joined them on their patio, sipping iced tea and gazing west across fields finally unlocked from the frosts of winter. In the distance, mountain peaks poked above the horizon. A row of gnarled pines cast long shadows where Mom helped us plant a garden and Dad helped us paint a fence. They assistedwith our fledgling book business, with proofreading and mailing, offering topical advice, busy with things they loved.
    And every night without fail, Jeff would tap on their door and go in for a good-night hug. Rachael loved reading to them. Steve opted to watch hockey with his grandpa on Saturday nights. I snapped pictures of the two of them eating ice cream and pizza—usually in that order. Sometimes Ramona and I would eavesdrop, but mostly we’d slip out, leaving the five of them together. We talked of never returning, and wondered if they’d really miss us at all.
    We had no idea what lay ahead, so we did the only thing we knew to do: took that next step, believing it to be the right one.

Never lend your car to anyone
to whom you have given birth
.
    E RMA B OMBECK
    A long about the time we took on boarders, Ramona and I awakened to the fact that our children had become teenagers. Not that they were always easy to have around before, but they were now showing more of a penchant for the irrational, which was summed up well years ago in a book title:
Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?
    It seemed hardly a week ago that they were in the springtime of life. Now it was more like summer—too much heat and late nights, too much energy and growth. I said to my wife one morning, “Isn’t God wise and good? He gave us twelve years to develop a love for our dear little children so we wouldn’t lock them in the trunk and swallow the keys when they became teenagers.”
    My first introduction to teens—apart from being one myself—was when a teenage girl began baby-sitting our kids. We paid her to act like an adult so we could go out and act like teenagers. We also paid her five bucks an hour to eat twenty bucks’ worth of our food and watch our movies while she did her homework.
    From the day they are born, children have one thing in mind: becoming teenagers and taking over the planet. They want us grownups out of the way. They make fun of our hairstyle (if we are lucky enough to have one), spend our money, crash our car, and eat our lunch. They even stop laughing at our jokes.
    Someone asked me the other day what I do. “I’ll tell you what I do,” I said. “I follow teenagers around the house. I shut lights off. I close fridge doors.” It’s a full-time job.
    Here are a few things I am waiting to hear my teenagers say. I believe I would die of heart failure if they made any two of these statements in the same evening:
       Who needs to eat out? Let me make something.
       Dad, I sure could use a little advice.
       We won’t need the car—we’re walking.
       There’s nothing to eat around here. I’ll go buy something.
       We don’t do anything as a family anymore.
       You relax, I’ll do the dishes.
       New movies aren’t cool. Let’s watch something old.
       Hey, I’ve been on the phone a lot. Why don’t I pay the phone