Thanks for successful D.A.R.E. ride

On behalf of the New Baden Police Department, D.A.R.E. Motorcycle Ride, we would like to sincerely thank all our supporters and motorcycle riders over the last ten years. This year's event was the largest yet, with 313 motorcycles, approximately 470 participants and 63 communities represented.

The continued assistance we receive in hosting the event has been the key to the success of the ride. This year rider registration was handled by local volunteers, members of the New Baden Lions Club and New Baden Chamber of Commerce. New Baden Jaycees did an outstanding job of cooking and serving the food along with several volunteers, while the boy scouts assisted in clean-up.

The Village Scribe/ Trenton Sun put together a very informative booklet, highlighting our paid advertisers and directions for the ride. Trenton Processing did a great job in processing our hog and deep frying the brats.

The local and county businesses that donate money, food and advertise in our booklet are invaluable in their support to the D.A.R.E. program. Their contributions allow local children to be taught information on resisting drugs, alcohol, and violence and dealing with bullying from other kids. Please support our local businesses.

Thank you all for a great event and we hope to see you again next year. The children in our communities are certainly worth all the time and effort.

Sincerely,

Mike Riley,

Chief of Police

New Baden

I'm an adult now. Does being 18 REALLY make you an adult? I don't know.

I don't really feel any different... but whatever. Only thing different now is I can buy porn, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. I guess they figure you should be a smoking, gambling sex addict by the time you're 18.

Honestly, there isn't very much to say. I am an adult, so maybe I will get treated like one finally. But, I doubt it. No matter what all the "older adults" will always see me as a kid even when I am 30.

I still feel like a kid, besides the fact that I have a job, a car, and I am a senior. I still have a little kid in me. Growing up sucks... every year just gets worse...more responsibility, and more and more crap we have to deal with every day. I kind of wish I wouldn't have wished to be this old when I was younger. It all went by way too fast.

I guess its true... youth is wasted on the young.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive.

My first-born baby girl reached the age of majority last week, but I hope that turning 18 doesn't mean she's ready to strike out on her own, because I'm sure not ready for her to leave (despite younger daughter Zoë's entreaties that we start charging her sister rent).

Miranda was born in Charleston, South Carolina, September 13, 1989, just about a week before Hurricane Hugo ravaged the eastern seaboard.

I'll never forget the emotions that ran through my mind the night Sybil, Miranda, my mother, my nephew and myself rode out the storm in a little frame house in Walterboro, South Carolina, trying to tune in a battery-operated transistor radio for updates.

Miranda was due on Labor Day that year, but she waited another week before announcing her presence. To my occasional frustration, that same sort of stubbornness has marked much of her life since.

With Hugo hanging ominously over the Atlantic Ocean, and homeowners and businesses taping their windows in anticipation of a category four hurricane, Sybil went into labor on an overcast Monday morning, and we made the tension-filled one-hour drive to the hospital in Charleston.

After careening into a circle drive in front and escorting Sybil to the maternity ward, I went back down to park the car, which was still running, with both front doors wide open. When I returned to her room, both mother and daughter were in distress. The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around her shoulder, limiting her oxygen supply and not allowing her descent into the birth canal.

An emergency Cesarean birth was necessary, and our newborn baby's beauty and good health provided profound relief.

The hurricane brought Miranda her second life-threatening experience in her first week on the planet. As we sat in our tiny living room, deciphering static, one thought rolled in a continuous loop through my mind. The stakes just got a lot higher.

It is a part of our adaptability as humans that we are able to subordinate such thoughts to daily living before they drive us mad. If we become too consumed with the awesome responsibility of parenting, I believe we do our children more harm than good. That said, resisting our protective urges is one of parenting's more difficult aspects, and the cause of most conflicts with our kids.

It cannot have been easy for Miranda, growing up at the hands of slightly twisted parents. Both Sybil and I are definitely skeptics and probably pessimists and maybe fatalists. The mistakes we have made as parents are too numerous and too wrenching to chronicle.

I consider it a tender mercy that we have assisted in the development of a beautiful, opinionated, passionate, funny, socially-adept, occasionally quirky 18-year old woman, who continues to be more precious to both of us than she will be capable of understanding until if (no pressure), and when (no time soon, please), she has children of her own.

Although I have trouble specifically defining my shortcomings as a father, I am sure they are many and varied, and I feel a certain amount of guilt for them. But if my daughter's personality is a little off-kilter because of my inadequacy (or Sybil's; I'm perfectly willing to blame it on her), that's okay with me. It's one of the things I love about her. Here's a clue to Miranda's personality. When I asked her what kind of cake she wanted for her birthday, she told me she wanted pie.

Productivity and conformity are key ingredients to the ongoing social experiment. Indeed, it sometimes seems like we're all hamsters on one very big wheel, and it requires maximum and consistent effort to keep it spinning. So it's critical that most of us simply put our heads down and keep grinding... shut up and do our jobs, if you will.

We also need hellraisers in the world, and I think that's the role Miranda has embraced. She questions the value of things most of us take for granted, and she's willing to take a chance on formulating divergent opinions. I think there will be times when that makes her life more complicated, but I hope it will also make it more satisfying.

We all need pain in order to measure pleasure, discomfort to contrast contentment, tragedy to appreciate triumph.

So here she is, in all her glory, recognized as an adult in the eyes of the law. Here she is, charming and snide, loving and sarcastic, empathetic and cold, perfect and flawed. Here she is, not the kind of person one would construct in a laboratory, but the kind whose persona is formed by living.

Here she is, our daughter, but now her own person. And embarrass her as it might, her mother and I want her and everyone else to know that we will always love her for both reasons.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive.