The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

They’re all grown up and gone now, but The Young Girls—my daughters—will always be teenagers. That’s what I remember them as the most. Diaper stage—who wants to remember that? Terrible twos, same thing. Nope. Teenagers are the most memorable.

You know you’ve got teenage girls if:

You get into the family car and all the mirrors are aimed at the driver. The outside one, the passenger-side one, the one mounted in the middle of the windshield—even the one on the back side of the passenger sun visor—all aimed at you. I got used to it after a while, but at first, it was like entering a carnival fun house. Startling. I doubt even Ford knows about this. Someone tell them for me.

You know you’ve got teenage girls if:

You can’t remember what the family car looks like, at least, not for sure, since it’s rarely home. Sometimes you meet it out on the highway, usually headed the opposite way, and there appears to be at least fifteen other girls inside it, all waving madly at me. Every time that happens, I call my insurance agent and raise the coverage. She gets a little excited. “How many passengers?” she asks disbelievingly. I figure let her in on the action. No sense having your day spoiled alone.

You know you’ve got teenage daughters if:

The only possession that you own that doesn’t end up in the bathroom is the family car. At least, it hasn’t made it there so far. Anything else that’s missing is in there somewhere. Radios, televisions, telephones, the three spare sets of keys for the family car, heaters, popcorn poppers, all their clothing, all their shoes, a card table, two chairs, a quart of house paint and two pairs of roller skates—they’re all in there. If you can’t find it, it’s in the bathroom.

You know you’ve got teenage daughters if:

You can’t find the family auto and you’re afraid to look in the bathroom.

You know you’ve got teenage daughters if your shampoo and hair rinse expenditures rival all your utility bills, both of which added together don’t equal the monthly gasoline expenditures on the family auto. At least you see the empty hair treatment containers, which is more than you can say for the family auto.

You know you’ve got teenage daughters if:

There’s so much hair shampoo in the septic tank that it foams out the plastic pipe sticking up out of the lawn. It looks like a Laurence Welk bubble machine gone berserk. The pumper truck spews suds out the top of its tank on the way down the driveway, leaving bunches of shiny bubbles stuck on the grass out in the field. They’re kind of pretty, in a toxic sort of way.

You know you’ve got teenage daughters if:

You wake up in the middle of the night to strange whimpering and crying noises, which turn out to be not coming from the daughters at all, but instead are coming from the water heater. How it’s lasted this long isn’t clear, but it has helped that we’ve discovered its Achille’s heel, where if you hit it just right with the broken leg off one of the wooden chairs that melted in the bathroom, it quits shivering and banging and begins to heat again. Still, it’s a worrisome situation. Perhaps it needs to be relocated to the bathroom, where it won’t be so lonely…

You know you’ve got teenage daughters if:

The health insurance agent trying to sell you a different policy asks: “So, what about pregnancy benefits, sir, will you be needing them?” To which you reply: “Me and the Old Girl aren’t having any more kids, you can bet on that.” To which he replies, with a strange look on his face: “I wasn’t thinking about you; I was thinking about your daughters.”

Oh. Them. That. “Look,” I tell him, “usually they’re so busy in the bathroom that they don’t have time to get pregnant.” Then I tell him that at their first idle moment, the water heater is moving in to keep them occupied.

You know you’ve got daughters if:

You can’t read the newspaper without every article seeming to be about teenage pregnancy or AIDS. You can’t watch TV without every commercial being about birth control or herpes.

Then, just so they can keep you interested, they come home, slowly walk up to you and say, as you fall to the floor in a faint, “Guess what, dad?” Guess? Guess? The list of possible disasters is endless.

Guess what—you’ve got teenage daughters.