READ: Equally weird Seacoast news

The more news I read, the less news I read. What I mean is – the news is not new. Terrorists, football, Condoleezza, Jacko, Microsoft, Mideast peace, computer virus, bird flu, Oscars, Trump – there’s nothing I don’t know here.

Then along comes the story of a four-year old in Sand Lake, Michigan who drove his mother’s car solo down to the local video store – and back. The boy apparently sneaked out of the house at 1:30 in the morning in order to pick up his favorite video game. He started the car, put it in reverse (smashing a car in the parking lot), shifted into first gear and drove a quarter of a mile to the store. It was closed, so the boy drove back home.

Now that is new. I can’t shake the mental image of some kid in footy-pajamas standing on the seat as he navigates the family SUV to the corner mall. It probably wasn’t an SUV – and I made up the pajama part – but that’s the picture in my head. According to the AP report, the kid just cruised along at 15 mph because he couldn’t reach the accelerator pedal.

Can you picture this? Do you see the look on his face as he scans the stores, and then, spotting his destination, turns in? Does he say – Uh-oh – when he notices the shop is shut, then pops the car back into gear, turns the wheel around and heads home. I had trouble doing that in driver’s ed when I was 16. Who is this kid?

This kid is news. He did something very few four-year olds have done, as far as we know anyway. Maybe they’re all out driving around at night. My wife tells me that she and her brother once released the parking brake in a truck and rolled down a hill. She was six. Her brother was four. But they didn’t start up the engine and go shopping. You have to wonder what game the kid was looking for. It must be pretty good.

The cop who apprehended the toddler thought he was watching a car with a drunk or no driver. He followed it and was surprised to see the empty car turn itself into the driveway of an apartment complex. It crashed into two parked cars, stopped, then backed into the police car. Nobody pressed charges. The kid didn’t go to the slammer, but he is now the youngest person to Michigan to receive a driving citation.

The mother had apparently taught her son to drive by sitting him in her lap and explaining how the gears worked. My father did the same with me. Then I used to sit in the car alone waggling the giant wheel and making vroom-vroom mouth noises. But I was not a newsmaker. It just never occurred to me that I had enough training to take off on a joy ride.

What’s missing from the AP story is the fact that Adrian Cole, aged four, had his video game taken away by his mom as a punishment. According to the Grand Rapids Press that broke the story, Adrian woke in the morning and "put on his winter coat and boots, and climbed on a lounge chair to reach keys on the the wall and unlock the dead bolt."

That’s premeditation all right. Never dismiss the ingenuity of a ticked-off toddler.I once saw a little girl of three rip all the phone wires out of the wall so that her mother wouldn’t call her dad about her bad behavior. The car, it turns out, was just a Geo Prizm. The newspaper even printed a map of the boy’s rote to and from the video store as if it was the epic journey of Odysseus, which in a way, it was.

It’s a scary story too, of course, one you stop laughing. And we should all be more concerned for that kid than amused. What is this world coming to? Not much last week, apparently, except in Grand Rapids.