Scenario: Derek and I stop at Dairy Queen for ice cream after a less-than-taxing visit to the lumber yard. As is typical for this particular location we are nearly the most senior people in the building, the restaurant itself employing kids of a median age of roughly fifteen years old, and the bulk of the clientèle their contemporaries. We’ve ordered. We’re standing with the throngs of other customers at the pick-up counter clutching our plasticized number cards in our sweaty palms waiting for our Blizzards(TM) to be fumbled from the prep area to our persons. Facilitating this process — in fact it seems to be her entire job to move ice cream from one counter to another and call our numbers — is a young girl named Sara, herself perhaps only fifteen or sixteen years old.

The Setup: Another customer waiting for ice cream is a mother with her two kids, one a girl of about twelve, and the other (as we would soon find out) a young boy named Cole of about sixteen and a peer of the scatterbrained Sara. The conversation went something like this:

“Sara? Is that you?” The mother gasps. “We thought you moved away. What are you doing working here.”

Sara goes on to explain in a sputtering dialect of teenager English (I dare not attempt to replicate here) that they’ve just moved within the city — and as the dialog unfolds the eavesdropping audience (ie, Derek and I) deduce that the quiet son and the infamous Sara had once gone to school together, but that Sara had disappeared months and months ago, blah, blah, blah…

The Swing and Miss: There comes a time in every young man’s life when your mom talking to one of your peers is the ultimate source of embarrassment. Nothing horrible need be said. Nothing of consequence need be uttered. It is embarrassing in and of itself. And then, on those special and extra-rare occasions, mothers are somehow capable of stepping beyond the line:

“We’ve really missed you.” The mom says finally. “Cole has missed you, too.”

At this point I wish I had a camera because rarely does one witness the embodiment of abject horror on the face of a single person. I mean to say, the life of this young lad flitted through his eyes in a flash of terror and consequence that could not been greater had a herd of stampeding beasts been charging him down naked on the sun drenched savanna live on high definition satellite television.

Awwwwwwwwk-ward!

Sara promptly returns to distributing ice cream with an apologetic smile and an “I’ve gotta, uh… get, uh…”

I turn to Derek and say under the whir of the ice cream blenders: “Don’t you just hate it when your mom flirts for you?” And yet another presentation of ‘DQ Dinner Theatre’ ends with a light-hearted chuckle from the audience.