Driving for the first time is like walking for the first time. It's a different set of wings but it still feels like flying. The independence is the same, the freedom, the spontaneous joy. The inexperience.

        You're on your own again, for the first time.

        Instead of climbing bookshelves or wandering out of the yard to chase a butterfly or a dog, you're turning a key in an ignition. Instead of scraping your knee when you fall, you're hitting a tree.

        Ohio 28 is a pretty avenue, out where Sara Dale and her friends were driving last Monday. The cornfields crowd the road on either side. The stalks are close enough to sway from the breeze of a passing car. Where her car hit the American beech tree, a dirt road leads from the highway up through the fields. It's very quiet.

        Sara and her front seat passenger lived. The four kids in the back did not. The tangible reason for this is that the two up front were wearing seat belts; the four in the rear weren't.

        Maybe someday, we will make cars that will not start unless everyone riding is wearing a seat belt. Unbuckle the belt and the engine would stop, not to be revived until all belts were back on. Surely, the technology is available to do that now.

        There is no such technology for children who are 16. There is no governor for the restless optimism of youth.

        You don't know how it was, exactly, with the six friends out for a summer ride in the last, precious days before school resumes. But you can imagine. The radio was up loud, the conversation was light, sassy and pleasantly inconsequential. Kids are never better than when they're enjoying being kids. Probably, someone was laughing.

        And then they weren't.

        At a time like this, you want to wrap your children in a cocoon and keep them in a glass case, from the time they turn 16 to the day they leave your home to make their own. Only you can't, so you cherish the moments you have, you remind them driving is a privilege with responsibilities to themselves and others. And you tell them to wear a seat belt.

        When I was living at home and driving at night, my mother never slept until she heard the opening of the garage door. My wife is the same now. Too much of this happens.

        As a high school wrestler, I practiced with a guy named Nathan Blice. One day, we worked out and talked about a concert we were going to the next night. “Maybe I'll see you there,” he said. On his way home from the show, Nathan ran his car into a utility pole at 70 miles an hour.

        Too many kids die in wrecks, their memories honored with the instant memorials you see everywhere now: Flowers, photographs, a handmade cross anchored in a bed of rocks. By Wednesday morning, seven bunches of flowers were at the base of the American beech tree on Ohio 28. One lay atop a hubcap.

        Tuesday and Wednesday, counselors and clergy were available at Goshen High and at a church across the street. Some 80 people took advantage of that Tuesday, “to validate their feelings” in the words of Goshen Superintendent Charlene Thomas. The kids weren't asking why; they knew no one could tell them that. They just wanted to talk.

        People will see the deaths of four high school kids as senseless, and they were. But they weren't without meaning. No death is that. On Tuesday morning, I cut the story of the tragedy from the newspaper. I put it on the kitchen table, so when The Kid Down the Hall emerged for breakfast shortly after noon, he'd see it.

        I will recall this tragedy every time he asks for the car keys. I will invest this sorrow with all the meaning I can. This is the best tribute we lucky parents can pay to the families of those in pain today.

        “Love you,” I'll say to him. “Have a good time. Be careful. Wear your seat belt.”

        E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com.

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