Chaperone

By the time this week’s paper hits newsstands, my wife and son should be somewhere in Georgia, on their way to Florida, after having spent the night traveling cross country in a convoy of coach buses containing a significant portion of the Medford Area Senior High School student body.

My son Alex is a sophomore in the choir program. My wife is along as a chaperone.

For the the amateur etymologists out there, the word chaperone comes from the French “chaperon” meaning “hood.” The theory is this is based on the sense of providing protection, such as a cape or hat may. I prefer to think of it more as the type of hood one would wear when being kidnapped and taken by force to some undisclosed secondary location. In the event that you find yourself in such a situation, it is essential that you remember your Street Smarts lessons and break out the taillight from inside the trunk and attempt to waive down traffic.

This is not very practical advice, though, when you have voluntarily embedded yourself within a large horde of students. In this case, you may wish you had the hood to hide in and pretend you have indeed been kidnapped and are blissfully on your way to some terrorist camp where you won’t have to deal with teenage angst and drama.

As you can tell, there is a very good reason my wife is the one who volunteered to be a chaperone for the trip rather than myself. She has suggested that she will call me gloating about being in the warm sunshine of Florida. In response I have told her that I will be very busy not chaperoning a lengthy bus trip filled with hormone-addled high schoolers and that she should feel free to leave me a voicemail when I don’t answer.

This year’s trip is larger than normal size due to it including both the band and choir students. Typically they try to space those trips apart. However, because of COVID-19 and the restrictions on school sponsored out of state travel in the past few years, the decision was made to combine the trips this year.

Going on overnight bus trips is a great experience for young people. For those of us who need three visits to the chiropractor and a bottle of Advil and a fifth of brandy because they slept in the wrong position in their own bedroom, the lure of adventure is less, well, alluring. I am content at this point to vicariously experience the trip through the nonstop barrage of social media posts I expect to endure over the next few days. I’m good with this, and really don’t want to go out of my way to travel to a place where the mosquitos don’t ever go away for the winter.

I was never a band or choir kid so I never got the chance to go on those epic cross-country overnight trips. I was one of those special kind of cool kids who did things like Model State Legislature and model U.N. (representing the proud island nation of Vanuatu. I am pretty sure I still have the flag somewhere) and American Legion Boys State. I am sure you can picture how cool I was in high school. Yeah, I was quite the rebel with my hair grown down to my shoulders and the classic early-90s mullet.

School trips are important for the experience they provide. Growing up as part of a large family, any family vacations were spent doing low-cost things like going camping or going on day trips to the beach. Yes, prior to Atlantic City being destroyed by corrupt casino developers, it was a pretty cool place and parking on Mediterranean and Baltic Avenue was dirt cheap. For a few dollars in parking, a 30-minute drive and the cost of a large bag of peanuts a family of eight kids could be entertained on the beach for an entire day.

While I look back on those times fondly, at the time I was always envious of my better off classmates who went on actual trips and who would come back whining about long car rides or how they got food poisoning from some dodgy airport food.

I am glad my kids have had the opportunity to go on out of state trips through school. The experience is something you remember for your entire life.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.