Perspective

There was some discussion in the Tally-ho household recently about whether a certain R-rated movie was suitable for the middle-school Young Relative. My first reaction was that I didn't want him to be exposed to the very questionable material, attitudes and language.
But then I remembered when I was his age, and the book "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo was all the rage in my class.
Did it contain violence? Yes, graphic and extreme. Racism? Yep. Cursing? Bloody well right. Irresponsible drug and alcohol use and other bad choices? For sure. Sex? Oh, my, yes. The one kid who had a paperback copy passed it around surreptitiously and, not surprisingly, it automatically opened right to the dog-eared page 29, the scene in which Sonny Corleone gets friendly with his sister's maid of honor.
So imagine my surprise as a seventh-grader when my mother -- my MOTHER! -- bought me a copy of "The Godfather" at the used-book store. I had horrible images of her discovering some of the naughty material in it and thinking I had tried to pull one over on her by expressing interest in it.
I thought I'd better take the bull by the horns.
"Mom," I said, with considerable embarrassment. "There's some kind of, um, adult stuff in this book."
"I know," she said matter-of-factly. "I thought you were mature enough to handle it."
Forty years later I remember those words with pride. And I still have my copy of the book. "Soon to be a major motion picture from Paramount," it says on the back cover.
(Oh, and the kid who passed around the book in our class? He went on to become a Secretary of Education for Pennsylvania.)