It turns out that boys are different from girls... sort of

It was Homecoming at Youngest Son's high school this past weekend. On our trips to school in the morning I would frequently inquire whether he was planning to go to the dance on Saturday night. If I did not broach the topic, he was not about to volunteer any information. Answers came back generally in the range of "maybe," although the grunting of the teenage male in the pre-dawn hour that we drive to school is always subject to interpretation.

By last Friday morning, though, it appeared pretty certain that he would not go. The reasons were not immediately apparent.

Youngest Son contributed to the sophomore football team's victory Friday evening in some small way; he was on the field fairly often when his team was on offense. Long Suffering Spouse and I waited, as is our custom, for him to emerge from the locker room and hit us up for dinner money. Then we could go home and await his call to be picked up, after the varsity game.

Honestly, when the phone went off Friday night, I did not know what it was. Somehow, though, I came out of my coma and got into the car to get him.

"I may need a flower after all," said Youngest Son as he climbed into the van.

"Huh?" I said, or at least something like that. The grunting of the pater familias rudely roused from a deep slumber on a Friday evening is also subject to interpretation.

It seems that, while cheering on the varsity, Youngest Son found time to get a date for Saturday's dance. Or some group of girls figured out that he was not yet committed and assigned one of their own unassigned to be his escort. My brain was working even slower than usual, but this is what I understood to be the gist of his grunts.

Flash forward now to Saturday evening: Modern teenagers do not attend functions in pairs, not usually. It is considered appropriate to band together as a group. This works particularly well where the young man and his escort have an acquaintance of less than 24 hours. Such was the case here. But the young girl was good friends with one of the girls from the neighborhood that Youngest Son has known since kindergarten and he was quickly enrolled in a group of about 20 all going to the dance together.

It was a good thing that Youngest Son alerted us to the need for a flower. Long Suffering Spouse got it, of course, because, after waking up early for a driver's ed class, Youngest Son spent the remainder of the day resting up from his labors on the gridiron of the night before. Meanwhile his escort was apparently (read the following at the much faster pace appropriate for teenage girls now) thrilled to be going and had gone shopping with her mom all day and finally finding just the right dress and there was hardly any time to do her hair or nails or anything....

Gosh, just typing that about wore me out.

And so another Homecoming goes in the books.

So different from our recent experiences with Younger Daughter. (You can read about her 2006 Homecoming campaign here.) Younger Daughter talked incessantly about Homecoming, and later about Prom, and about prospects for dates, and about other people's dates, and who should be paired up with whom. The linked post is but one example.

But that particular post, if read with this one, does illustrate one way in which boys and girls are the same, at least in our family: Things seem to happen at the very last minute.