This is an artist's conception of what a fifteen or sixteen year-old offender sees in court.
      Nowadays the bald-headed lawyer defending this
      hairy teenager charges about $150 an hour to
      appear in court on tresspassing or criminal mischief
      charges; and the bald-headed judge will usually assess
      fines and reasonable court costs up to about $1,5000.

      From Moronhood to Manhood: the Miracle of Maturity

      A shiny black Escalade pulls into the empty space next to me in the Galleria parking lot, a handsome guy in his early 40's gets out, looks over at me and breaks into a smile of recognition. I remember him, even though it's been about 25 years since Wes was my student. We make the usual small talk: "I'll bet you don't remember me, but I used to be your student back in the 70's." And I say: "Of course, I remember you." Most of the time I really don't remember, but I remember Wes because he once wrote a paper that I never forgot and because his story illustrates so well how the foolish behavior of teenagers, the resulting lessons that they learn and the consequences that they pay can sometimes accomplish the miracle of turning a teenager into a man and because the tale underlines what my own father used to say: "Getting a boy from moronhood to manhood usually requires a miracle or two."

      It's hard to believe it, I know, but this guy driving the $45,000 Cadillac SUV did some really stupid stuff when he was about 15 years old. It was all in a paper Wes wrote about the time that he and a friend tried to hitch a ride home on a freight train. It was more than an hour past their midnight curfew, they were in downtown Birmingham, they had missed the last bus out of town for the night, they needed to cover the twenty-five or thirty miles back to Oneonta in a hurry, a train was stopped on the tracks, they thought it was headed north towards home, they climbed aboard an open railroad wagon car half-full of gravel, the train started, and -- after about fifteen minutes -- the train was headed south at full speed down the tracks toward Tuscaloosa. They were on a train headed the wrong way, but they were laughing crazily -- at first! But then the little pieces of wind-blown gravel were starting to whip into their faces, the train was now going too fast to jump, and the half-load of gravel was starting to slide all over the car at every little variation in the speed. The gravel was trying to bury them alive! The adventure wasn't as funny as they thought.

      Of course, Wes mentioned in that long ago paper that he had learned some valuable lessons from this experience, great practical stuff such as "never hop a ride on a gravel car," "always know the difference between north and south," "keep up with the time," and other little life lessons that make adult life possible. He also learned that it is never a good idea for the father of a teen-ager to receive a call from the Tuscaloosa police informing him that his son has been arrested for tresspassing and hopping rides on trains bound for distant places in the middle of the night.

      As Wes retold it in the parking lot, however, what he emphasized were the consequences to that adventure, consequences that lasted a very long time. There were two 115-mile trips from Oneonta to Tuscaloosa over the next four months as each of the friends made his appearance before a Tuscaloosa County judge. Those consequences were fines and court costs that amounted to over one thousand dollars apiece. Then there were the doctor bills. That shifting gravel had slammed Wes into the steel wall of the railway car and broken his arm. Since there was no insurance, Wes also had to come up with $350 to pay the doc who fixed his arm. And then there was a bald-headed lawyer in Tuscaloosa who charged $400 to keep Wes and his buddy from having to actually serve 30 days confinement in the Tuscaloosa County Jail. Because the minimum wage was only one dollar an hour in those days, it took Wes over 80 weeks at his part time job to earn enough to pay his father back for all those expenses. As Wes said the other day as we reminisced, "the result of that little train ride was one year and seven months of pure misery as I watched every penny I planned to use to buy a car go into my father's bank account instead of mine."

      Well, Wes is driving a Cadillac today and lives in a very nice house down near the Cahaba River, all of which is being paid for by the profits of a not so little business he started several years ago. He is clearly no longer the moron who hopped a ride on a gravel car, and it didn't hurt my pride as a teacher when he told me the other day that the best lessons he ever learned came from "a ride in a railway car." I think, however, even Wes would agree that it was a miracle he ever got to be a man.

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