You would have thought I had spent enough time in a vehicle.

I rode on the bus so long each day that by the time I got to school, it was time to go home.

I parked in the seat immediately behind the driver. I sat there because he liked me so much. I waited for him to say, “Al, old buddy, do you want to drive? All you have to do is to keep the shiny side up.”

I’m still waiting.

School was an enduring mystery. I wasn’t able to confine my thoughts to a tidy place. I moved from one grade to another as I grew too big for the school’s furniture.

My natural habitats were farms and small towns. The farms were ruled by chores. The towns were so small that only two trains went through each day—one eastbound and one westbound. It was something to see as the tracks ran north and south.

Parents had few rules in those thrilling days of yesteryear. Farm kids were told to be home for milking and town kids were told to be home for supper. We were all told that nothing good happened after midnight.

It was BC — Before Computers. I was driving my father’s car. It had that old car smell and an automatic transmission that allowed me to remain shiftless. One by one, my friends and I had obtained driver’s licenses. It wasn’t easy getting a license when most of my thoughts were concentrated on growing sideburns. Getting a license made me feel as though I had invented the wheel. I loved driving. Cars were important. It didn’t matter so much where we were, what was important was how we got there. Dad had warned me about many things. He said fatherly things like, “Do you know what road is very dangerous? All of them.” He said other things, too, but I hadn’t had time to listen to everything he told me.

We were young men in the same harness, but pulling in different directions. Our lives needed tinkering. We hadn’t found ourselves yet and we weren’t searching that hard. We would contribute to the greater good, but not yet. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we were in danger of growing up.

Since we came from homes devoid of remotes and computers, we needed other mindless diversions. We had a severe case of idle ambition. We would put forth a great amount of effort in order to do nothing. We were dragging Main Street. It was a ritual. Some called it looping Main, cruising Main, or scooping the loop. Passengers would kick in a dollar to buy gas and I would drive endlessly. I would motor from one end of the city’s primary street to the other and repeat the process as long as the gas held out.

If Darwin had been right, we would have been doing something else. It was dawdling in motion. It was déj vu all over again and again — behavior that baffled our parents who had done the same thing when they were our age. We punctuated our aimlessness by waving or honking the horn at others in cars engaged in the same endeavor. I’ve always believed that if everyone would get into a car and drag Main, there would be a lot more automobiles on Main. I still believe that.

We listened to rock and roll on the AM radio at a volume just loud enough that we needed to yell over it. We were hanky looking for panky. Dragging Main was ordinarily a harmless activity. Unfortunately, this time we were in possession of some fireworks that were brought in from South Dakota.

On occasion, I would diversify our mindless pursuit by turning down another street and driving past a friend’s house. One of us decided that it would be a great idea to throw a cherry bomb onto the lawn in front of our friend’s darkened house. We had deduced that the worst that could happen was that the cherry bomb would kill a few dandelions. One of us should have said, “Let’s don’t and say we did.” No one said that.

A buddy employed the vehicle’s cigarette lighter to light the cherry bomb. Every circus has its clown. With a smile like a goat eating thistles, he chucked the cherry bomb out the window.

This is when the lightning hit the merry-go-round.

He should have made sure that the window was open before he tried throwing a lit cherry bomb out of it.

Thanks to that stupid law of gravity, the cherry bomb fell to the floor with a bang.

And my parents thought rock and roll was deafening.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Sunday and Thursday.