As a freshman, my son is not offered the privilege of parking a car at school, even though we have a car here that he can use. (With 166,000+ miles on it, he can use it until it's no longer usable. After that, he's on his own.)
So normally that car sits in our driveway and waits for him to come home on a weekend and burn through a tankful of gas visiting all his friends.
A few weeks ago, however, he and his friends planned a Road Trip to Washington, DC. I picked him up on a Friday and he came home long enough to grab his car keys and leave again. They spent Saturday in DC, returning to Philadelphia late that night. And he figured that since he was coming home the following Friday, he might as well just keep the car there for the rest of the week.
It will tell you something about my son's driving ability and trustworthiness as well as the neighborhood in which he attends school when I say that I was more worried about that car sitting on a city street than I was about him driving three friends to our nation's capitol. Sure, he locked the car doors. Sure, he could see the car from his dorm-room window. Sure, the car is 9 years old and looks it. But he did not have the privilege of parking in a secure student parking lot, and with out-of-state tags, I figured he was just asking for someone to come along and strip it. So I spent Friday afternoon waiting for the phone call that would begin: "Mom, there's no battery in my car."
To my great relief, that call never came. Instead, he was able to drive the car home with a few hundred more miles on the odometer and, of course, very little gas in the tank.
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