“Buckle up.”
Christie Baughman never failed to deliver that order to her son Tony whenever he slid into a car, either as a driver or a passenger.
“It didn’t matter if I rode with him or he rode with me,” she said Friday. “If I was in the car with him, he was going to buckle his seatbelt.”
It’s what mothers say. Your mother. My mother. All mothers. All the time. It’s how they’re wired. And aren’t we lucky for that.
But on Jan. 27, on a Friday afternoon in which so much else was swirling through Tony’s 18-year-old head — the car show up the road in Cleveland that he and friend Logan Fowler were taking in; the Silverdale Baptist Academy basketball game they planned to attend later that night; the 98 he’d made on a test that day at Silverdale (a rarity for an average student such as Tony); the girl he planned to meet after the game — well, lost in all that excitement were his mother’s seatbelt orders.