The No-Tell Motel

My wife says I could have an extramarital affair.

But that I would have to go north of Orlando.

Because there is no out of the way restaurant, no hotel, no aisle in Publix, no hospital waiting room where I don’t run into friends or old students or someone whom I know from my 58 years in Miami. I was graduated from Coral Gables High in 1973. And in spite of some defections to northern climes, there are a number of my classmates still bumping around here in South Florida. To discourage any hope of a clandestine assignation, there are also family friends everywhere in this burg. My dad was graduated from UM law in 1953. I see his classmates and their children and grandchildren in the gym and on the street. My mom was “Edison High, class of ’41.” (Go Red Raiders!) before she taught at the local university. To this day when my mom and I are out together we will bump into her old students who shyly ask, “Are you Miss Cohen?” “Well, I was,” my mom will reply pointing to me. “Before I met his father and got married in 1954.”

I wasn’t particularly thinking of stepping out on my wife when the two of us were visiting colleges and rehab programs in obscure New Hampshire towns recently. (Only the snarkiest of my gentle readers would have the lack of breeding to point out that many towns in New Hampshire might qualify as obscure.) But sure enough, as Patti and I were crossing a street, there turning into a driveway was a close friend from Miami. “Good to see you, David” she called, as if she had every expectation of bumping into me a thousand miles from the school both our daughters attend. “Good to see you too, Joanne,” I replied.

My wife–not a woman who is frequently at a loss for words–was dumbfounded. “Canada,” she muttered.

“Canada?” I asked.

“Canada,” she repeated. “If you wanted to have an extra-marital affair, you’d have to go to Canada.”

Not one to miss an opportunity no matter how abstract, I inquired, “Don’t you think you’d know if I were gone for days at a time?”

My wife, now back on her game, acknowledged that she would indeed notice my absence before chopping me up into little pieces and feeding me to the family dog.

Whether or not we no longer live in communities where “everybody knows everybody” is an open question. I would point out that there do seem to be some values in a place. Not values in the sense of “something good” but values meaning “shared understandings.”

In public and private schools in Miami, for example, everyone knows a kid from whom he can buy prescription painkillers. A shared understanding among kids is that drugs are ubiquitous at their schools. Indeed, I defy you to find a middle school child who will not respond to the query, “Do you know someone in your class from whom you could buy psycho-stimulants?” in the affirmative. (Admittedly, you might have to change “psycho-stimulants” in the above sentence to “ADD pills” but you get the idea.) Indeed for years, I have been asking kids in my office “How long would it take you to buy marijuana at your school?” The most common response is, “maybe 20 minutes.”

The outlier I heard recently was from an 11^th grader from a small town in Utah. He asked me to clarify what I meant by “drugs.” When I said “marijuana, I guess,” he replied, “Twenty minutes.” “What about cocaine then?” I continued. “Oh, that would take longer,” he said. “I would have to go over to the next town.” And then not wanting to disappoint me I suppose, he continued. “But I could be back in just over an hour.”

So if nowhere in the country is safe-no small town or big city, no school public or private-how do we keep our kids from drugs?

I will give my thoughtful readers a week to respond with their insights before adding my thoughts in the newsletter next Tuesday.

In the meantime, I will continue not to give any thought to isolated Northeastern towns in which I could have an unreported assignation.