age of innocence

This past week was a fellow bunkmate's 21st, so we made the 17 mile drive to the Colorado state line to hit up the nearest bar, aptly named the State Line. We were lucky enough to have a good Mormon boy to be our D-D, though his sobriety guilted us into being relatively abstemious. I don't think he realized our moderation, however, happy to make jokes about how wasted we were (or tatered, as another option. Pass it on).

Though I have little interaction with locals, the interaction I do have has illustrated some of the innocence produced by a life lived in small town religious America.

This first became clear during my CPR/First Aid class in a discussion of blood-born pathogens. Our instructor, as to cover all bases, asked us what the best way to prevent STDs was, and the D-D in question piped up,

"ABSTINENCE!"

A girl next to him penciled it in in our workbook above condoms.

They have obviously been taught well in this town where Mormon seminaries are located on public school property, or at least close enough for no one to be able to tell where one begins and the other ends.

I guess I'm being hard on these recent high school graduates, because it is not as if I was worldly at 18, or for that matter, very worldly now. My high school sobriety and naiveté was punctuated by one drunken night in the Riley Room (Rock me like a hurricane...) and a wild night celebrating the Red Sox victory. It took a wild night of Fabio fame and a 28 year old Uruguayan with saucy intentions to start me down a path towards anything vaguely resembling debauchery. Even through that, however, innocence was mostly retained, and it was only in retrospect that I realized the true significance of those events.

Still, I wonder if and when these kids will have those moments. I wonder if they will bust out of small town Utah and discover that one drink doesn''t make you totally incapacitated.

I kind of hope not