Looking for Trouble

I'm not very good at it, but I'm trying....

I’ve never really been the sort to go looking for trouble. This might have something to do with the fact that I’ve never been that good at it.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. There was that time in high school, for example. My parents were out of town for the weekend, I had the car, and a friend whose parents were also going out of town for the weekend was having a party. I have absolutely no recollection of that friend’s name. What I do remember — and this is a major plot point — is it was someone whose parents my parents knew and whose phone number my parents had, in the era when the only phone anyone had was a land line. But park that plot point for now. What you need to know is this was going to be a very big night. It wasn’t the first night I ever drank, but it was the first night I was going to drink at a party.

Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I made it to the party at all. When I was in high school, it took a long time to get dressed, a process that involved trying and tossing an absurd-in-hindsight number of identical pairs of jeans onto a reject pile before deciding on the first pair I’d tried. Do I actually remember this happening on this particular evening? I don’t, but given that it’s an accurate description of every time I got dressed in high school, I’m confident this is how the evening began.

By the time I arrived at the party, things were well underway. REO Speedwagon was blasting “Keep on Loving You,” people were dancing, and a keg was on the patio. Wasting no time, I headed for the keg, filled a red Solo cup, poured out a half-cup of foam, finished filling the red Solo cup, and took a sip of my first at-a-party beer — just as the friend hosting the party (if you’re reading this and it was you, let me know) came up and shouted in my ear the way people do at parties.

“Your mom’s on the phone.”

If this essay were a movie, this is the part where you’d hear the phonograph needle scratch across the record (we were still playing records then), completely destroying someone’s hard-earned copy of Hi Infidelity. Of course I’d told my mom where I’d be that evening. When you were in high school and decided to drink for the first time at a party, didn’t you share an advance copy of your itinerary with your parents?

Faced with a range of options that could only seem smart to a newly minted underage party drinker, I chugged the rest of my beer before I perp-walked myself to the phone.

“Mom?”

“Hi Honey, I didn’t want you to worry when you came home and saw the car in the driveway. Your dad’s not feeling well, so we came home early.” Pause. “What’s all that noise in the background?” Longer pause.

I’d told my mom where I’d be, but I hadn’t exactly told her what I’d be doing. I played it as cool as I could. “Just some music. We’re studying.” Hopeful pause.

“Okay, well, we’re going to bed. Turn out the lights when you get home.”

That was it. Crisis averted. I spent the rest of the night drinking Tab (a precursor to Diet Coke that, in hindsight, had enough chemicals in it that drinking it might turn out to be the most troubling thing I ever did). But this is how pathetically bad I was at looking for trouble. This evening was the apotheosis of my looking-for-trouble days, and not only did I not really get to follow through on it, but I didn’t even get in trouble for trying. Still, close calls can be strong medicine. I’ve welcomed trouble any number of times when it crossed my path since that evening, but I haven’t really gone out of my way to seek it out (unless you count extensive overseas travel, as my mother does). Besides, once cell phones entered the picture, my mom could track me down way too easily.

Until last week, that is, when, over forty years later, I went looking for trouble a second time. Down in Miami to visit my mom, I met a baby goat who lived in a petting zoo, although when I met him, he was trotting along a park path near the zoo, on a leash, with one of the zookeepers. My first reaction was to think, “What an adorable, oddly shaped dog.” Then I realized the adorable, oddly shaped dog was an adorable, appropriately shaped baby goat. Thanks to a Santa hat embroidered with his name that kept falling over his big, brown eyes, I also realized the baby goat’s name was Trouble. We weren’t formally introduced, but his hat said Trouble, and this adorable goat with an impish grin and eyes I could swim in for days, who insisted on nibbling and sniffing everything he could reach and a few things he couldn’t quite, was nothing but Trouble in the best possible way.

I have a terrible soft spot for adorable farm animals, especially goats, and I was hooked on Trouble. I fell so hard, I made a second trip to the park the day before I flew home, just to see him again. You read that right. With absolutely zero children accompanying me to use as an alibi, I convinced my 87-year-old mommy to drive me to the park so I, a full-fledged, grown-up person, could go to the petting zoo.

A few grown-up responsibilities got in my way, however, and we arrived at the park a bit later than planned. As the petting zoo came into view, I saw Trouble and his gang in the distance, perched atop a pile of rocks. As I got closer, I watched Trouble leap to the ground and trot alongside his little goat friends into the barn for the evening. By the time I got to the enclosure, the barn door was shut. It was just me standing next to my mom in front of the fence, wondering what would happen if a 59-year-old woman looking for trouble asked the Petting Zoo Lady if Trouble could come out to play. Foiled again.

But there’s always next week. And the week after that. I think I might just put a little more effort into looking for trouble. Or, at least, not wait another forty years to give it a go. Looking for trouble probably won’t look like it used to — drinking at parties isn’t what it used to be. At this point, it might just look like saying “why not” more than “why.” Or turning left when the GPS tells me to turn right. Then again, it might look like a baby goat in a Santa hat.

Why not?

Full disclosure…the goat whose picture appears above may look like trouble, but he isn’t Trouble. I’d planned on taking a photo when I went looking for Trouble, and now you know how that turned out. Like I said, I’m not very good at it….