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For the most part, parents want their kids to do better and be better than what they were when it is all said and done. For me, it's a little more simple -- I just don't want them to be stupid like me.
I bring this up because just recently, my son, Vincent, got the use of a car that, though owned by Ann Marie and me, will be his responsibility since his brother, Dominic, bought his own car (that's a column for another day). They used to share. There is no more sharing. He has a car.
Being up at Saint Francis, it helps because when he wants to come home on the weekend, he can do so without waiting to see if one of us can come get him. Of course, he is responsible for gas money while we will take care of insurance. We will be responsible for oil changes and repairs, also. But he has to help out, and it's already started.
I told him that you want to change the oil every 3,000 miles. It's a 2002 Honda Civic that belonged to my mom who put 30,000 miles on it over 16 years. Since then, Julianna, Dom and Vinny have it up to 170,000 miles in five years (go ahead … go ahead … you can swear. You have my permission).
Vinny calls me the other day and tells me he is going to need an oil change. I asked him how close he was to the 3,000 mile mark, which is on a sticker in the upper left side of his mirror. It's as clear as clear can be.
He tells me he's about 100-plus miles over the number to get it changed. Don't worry, I swore for both of us.
He now has an appointment for an oil change in a few days, which means the car will be further over the 3,000 mile limit. Wonder why I have so little hair?
But let's hope he doesn't end up with a lot of parking tickets like yours truly did back in 1985. I did not have a car back then to go to Penn State Altoona, but when I did not take the bus or hitch a ride from a wonderful friend named Jimmy Weakland, I would use either my dad's car, my brother John's car or my sister Cyndy's car. Occasionally I would get a parking ticket from the campus police but -- it gets worse from here.
I didn't pay the tickets. Any of them. Two years of tickets. Nada!
I figured they would look up those names and realize those people did not go to PSU Altoona so they would figure they were just up there feeding ducks or skating on the pond. Wrong.
Right before I was to go down to the main campus, I got a letter in the mail from PSU Altoona saying I could not transfer down until I paid $300 in parking tickets. Did I mention my mom opened that piece of mail before I did?
Ann Marie posed the question, "What if Vincent did that? You'd go nuts on him." And she's right, because I learned from experience, the experience being my mom going nuts on me. I had to pay the fine, which was a lot of money for a guy working for $3.35 an hour at a pizza shop as well as the Mirror.
You want another stupid thing I did? When I was 12, I played Little League down at East End and our coach got each of the 12-year-olds a bat with our first name on it as kind of a gift for it being our final year playing ball. It was a terrific gift which I kind of ruined.
My name is Scott Stephen Franco. I didn't like either one of them because they were not Italian-sounding enough. I should have been a Luigi or a Tony or even my favorite -- Carmine. Instead, I had the coach put my soon-to-be confirmation name on the bat -- Christopher. Not Italian, mind you, but Christopher Columbus was, so that is how I sold it to myself.
Did I mention that I was still five years from confirmation? But that is the name I chose for the bat.
My mother saw the bat, and she went -- wait, wait for it -- bat crazy. She wanted to break it over my head. She did not want me to use it as punishment, but my dad talked her out of that. I used it -- and later broke it -- while using it to play ball. My dad was pretty smart, too.
Vincent is on the track and field team at Saint Francis, and I don't think he'll be allowed to put "Vinny" on the hammer, which is the event he does at school. Besides, he's upset that we didn't give him a more Italian-sounding name than Vinny. He wanted to be Salvatore Franco. To be honest, I wanted that name for him, too, but the lady carrying twin boys that combined to weigh 13 pounds when she gave birth did not.
I can tell you this, considering the fact that she doesn't ever do anything stupid, I would listen to her. I wish I would have met her a lot earlier in my life.
Mirror Sports Writer Scott Franco writes a monthly column for the Mirror.