May two-four

This is May two-four weekend. That's the weekend named after Queen Victoria's birthday. In my youth, we used to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday by heading to the beaches of Lake Huron. Sauble Beach was a particularly popular destination. You'd round up a crew, at least one of whom had a car, and another had legit proof of age or a reasonable facsimile thereof, load up as many two-fours as the trunk would hold, and off you'd go for a weekend of drunken excess. If you couldn't remember anything between Friday night and Monday morning, that was considered a successful adventure. Back in the day, a lot of high-school students owned cars. If you had a part-time job you could afford one. If you could squeeze it onto your parents insurance policy, you could afford it even more. Things are different now. Not as many teen drivers on the roads. You can't afford a car on the strength of a part-time job, that's for sure. Then again, fewer impaired teen drivers on the highways can only be a good thing. Just buying a car is a prohibitive exercise. You're looking at a couple of thousand for a junker. Back in the pre-safety-check days, you'd go to the junkyard for your junker. Pick out the nicest thing you can find for fourty bucks. If you had to put a piece of cardboard on the floor to keep the slush from coming through the rust holes, no big deal. That changed when they brought in the safety checks. All of a sudden a cardboard floor didn't cut it any more. Nor did using a upended milk crate for a seat. Those milk crates were everywhere, remember? I must have known dozens of folks who kept their LP collections in milk crates they happened to find behind Safeway. But I digress. Even after the safety checks were introduced, you could do an end run for a time. There was a guy in Guelph who was happy to safety your new purchase, sight unseen,for a modest contribution to either his retirement fund or his liquor cabinet, or if you wanted priority service, both. Those days are long behind us. As are the days of youth flocking to the beaches of Lake Huron on two-four weekend. Now they just stay home and play kill-em-all video games in the comfort of their parents' house. At least nobody gets hurt.