September is a great month. There’s still time for lots of cookouts, the beginning of football season (PREDICTION: The Buffalo Bills will win the Super Bowl this year, if all the other teams come down with an intestinal virus for the rest of the season.), and good news, especially for parents, the start of the school year. (This means you can unlock the basement door and unshackle the little darlings.)

With the new school year in mind, I’d like to speak to those students attending their senior year in high school. Congratulations! You made it. Now, don’t mess up.

It has been a long hard climb to make it this far. You’ve eaten a ton of graham crackers, sat through tireless speeches, by teachers who excelled in hypnosis through monotonic voice activity, about the signing of the Magna Carta, and you’ve dealt with underclassmen’s ridicule, which included being stuffed into your hall locker, along with a copy of Introduction to Chemistry.

Yes, now you’re on top of the heap. Above all the rest. Looking down at the masses below. And what is uppermost on your mind? Not overachieving in academics, not closely evaluating the options that await you at graduation. No, you’re thinking about what you can do to those punky underclassmen (or, is it underclassperson?) to make up for the three years of abuse that you took from the seniors.

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Hey, old dude, like, what could you possibly know what’s, like, going on in my mind? Why don’t you, like, take a dose of Metamucil, watch an episode of “The Golden Girls” and, like, go to bed?” And do you know what I say? I say, “You’re right.”

Let’s face it, what could a seventeen year old possibly not know about life? You’re practically adults. You’re going to do what you want anyway. So, break loose. Enjoy your senior year. Pull that senior prank that the class will remember many class reunions from now.

I remember my senior year. We were wearing raccoon coats and “zoot” suits and jitterbugging our parents crazy. No, wait a minute. That was my parents’ senior year. My senior year was the year that our class turned on, tuned out, and learned how to speak French, so that we wouldn’t sound like foreigners when we moved to Canada. (Just kidding.) Actually, it was the year that we planted field corn on the fifty yard line and when the fall approached, there, in the middle of the football field, was a whole line of green stalks. Ha! Ha! What great fun. My parents enjoyed the laugh, too, especially when they got the bill from the Board of Education to have the field repaired.

So, seniors, when playing your senior prank, remember the consequences that come with your actions. (I still can’t eat an ear of corn now without feeling like I have to turn over my car keys to my father and being forced to go out to mow the lawn.)

Of course, there are other things you can concentrate on this last year. The Senior Prom. The Pep Rallies. The Malt Shop with Linda Lou. Oh, that’s right, you don’t go to malt shops. You hang out at malls, where you drop Raisinets from the upper level to the unsuspecting people walking below. (And you thought that I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of today’s youth.)

So, in conclusion, from a future senior to a future senior, stay in school, study hard, have fun, make friends with kids who look like they are going to be financially successful, and most importantly, don’t plant field corn on the fifty yard line because (a) it’s been done, (b) nobody will remember it at the class reunions, and (c) you’ll be mowing the lawn, not by choice, soon enough.