The Risk Pool
By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
Published: August 26, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/opinion/the-risk-pool.html?_r=0BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — THIRTY-SEVEN years ago this week my friend Pearce Bunting was at the wheel of my Volkswagen and I was in the passenger seat when he drove the car off a road in suburban Philadelphia. It bounced off a fire hydrant and then plunged into a small ravine. I remember thinking, as we flew through the air, that I was about to find out whether there was life after death. I heard the crash as if from a distant room. Then a vague blue blob spoke. "Are you all right?" it wanted to know, and then said, more reassuringly, "You're going to be all right."
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My son Sean, along with four million or so other members of the class of 2014, is about to begin his senior year in high school. It's impossible for me, and all those other parents, not to want to shield our young from the many accidents we know are waiting for them. Shielding, of course, being the problematic verb here, given that we spend the first decade or so of our children's lives attempting to stand between them and the brutality of the world, and then, slowly, begin to do the opposite, first gently, and later not so gently, shoving them out into the land of competitive sports, college admissions and fire hydrants of all sorts.
When he was a sophomore, my son was accepted to an exchange program with a high school in Cape Town. We congratulated him for his sense of adventure. A couple of months in, he called home, asking if it would be O.K. if he went bungee jumping from one of the highest bridges in the world. We said all right, as we did a few weeks later when he asked permission to go shark-cage diving. A month went by, and he called again. How about sky-diving? Please? We thought it over, consented, and then, the morning of the jump, sat bolt upright in our bed in Maine. Sky-diving? Seriously?
