Post-graduation life: Don't booze with the 'rents

I have lived within 15 minutes of College Park my entire life, and, like any good college student eager to get away, I've tried to keep the realms of school and home as separate as possible. And I've generally been successful. That is, until I discovered the biggest threat to keeping my double life intact: the graduation party.

This is a big deal. You made it through four, five or six years of college, and it's time to celebrate. I've gone to quite a few, including my own, in the past month. They're all pretty standard: Everyone hangs out on the deck of someone's "house house" - the place where they grew up, not their "house" in College Park. We're eating burgers and making small talk with proud distant relatives. Then somebody asks, "Hey, do you want to start a game of beer pong?" Or I swing by the family room and find people passing around a bowl, which gets handed to me.

I've done this before, a million times, in dorm rooms and apartments and houses up and down Knox Road. But never, never at home.

The streets of my neighborhood are quiet, boring places, so perfectly idyllic and suburban that a former resident who grew up here in the 1960s turned her childhood experiences into the sitcom The Wonder Years. These are places where I learned to ride a bike, where I walked dogs and pretended to run away from home. I can't do so much as drive to a Wendy's without calling back a million memories from childhood.

Call me sheltered, but when I was in high school, booze and weed were little more than old wives' tales, maybe something the kids at the back of the bus did. Those of us cradling our biology textbooks in the front row didn't have the time, the connections or the interest to try them.

Then in college, there was no shortage of opportunities to "experiment" as you saw fit. And shy of going to the hospital, you could do just about anything without the folks back home hearing about it. Why wreck that fragile balance by bringing a little bit of College Park back with you?

Maybe I'm being a little too uptight. Even my own relatives asked me where the beer was at my graduation party, and all I could really say was "sorry, you know my parents aren't down with that." They aren't, and I thought it would be disrespectful to have it any other way. (Of course, they had come to terms with the unpleasant fact their son drinks, which had been a well-kept secret until I crawled home inebriated one spring break.)

But it seems to me like the best part about messing around in College Park was that you were doing it on your own, without rules and generally without repercussions. I'd rather not try to get messed up in my parents' house, knowing I'd have some explaining to do the next morning - that is, if I could even get buzzed sitting in the room where I used to build Legos many, many years ago.

Dan Reed graduated in May with degrees in architecture and English. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.