The Snow Cone Club...with apologies to John Hughes

I had ordered an amaretto flavored shaved ice with a sweet cream chaser, while PK was working on a dubba-bubba pink and blue bubble gum combo, when three lanky teenage boys sauntered up to the window, ordered their poison and planted themselves at the opposite end of the resin picnic table we were sitting at.

They were dressed in the appropriately distressed mode, faded jeans, logo'd tees, sneaks, with a token trucker hat on the noggin of the smallest of the trio.

I imagined they were tempering whatever foul language they may have had in their vocabulary as they engaged PK in a conversation about her hot pink cast and how she broke her arm. From there, the ice broken and the snow cones slowly disappearing down our gullets, the talk turned to back and forth questions about who they/we were, where they/we lived, and what flavor snow cone they/we were enjoying.

These boys were hard to categorize or place into a clique and I was amused at myself for trying to place their social standing amongst their peers, merely because it would have been easier for me to relate to them if only I could fit them into one of "The Breakfast Club" stereotypes.

Problem is, I'm not up on what cliques exist here in my small town, evidenced by my total lack of ability to call the shots on where these kids either fit in, or didn't.

Just where do the FFA kids with their cool blue jackets and award pins up the wazoo fit into the social ladder of teendom? Certainly not with the Napoleon Dynamite's and Pedro's of the town...

The jocks we constantly read about in the newspaper are also the ones who frequently are up for academic scholarships when heading for college, so that stereotype falls by the sidelines.

And the band kids don't seem to be the most dysfunctional group at social gatherings either. At the last football game I attended, when the band marched out on the field, most of the people in the bleachers actually sat quietly and listened to them play.

It seems to me then, that because of the relatively small size of the school system, the kids must overlap their activities, and not choose to specialize in one subject over another. Without this relentless mind meld of social, academic, farm based, and extracurricular activities, many of these enterprises would cease to exist.

I'm sure I'll ponder this issue more as my girls get older and start socially interacting more with their peer group, but at the moment, the conversation with the 3 snow cone snarfing teens turned to a topic more on par with what I was thinking about as a pre-driving teenager -- cars.

More on the interesting hairpin and high bank turns that this conversation drove towards, and the revealing window to my past that it uncovered, in a future post.