Thursday, December 20, 2012

Gad

gad
verb, intransitive. To go around from one place to another, in the pursuit of pleasure or entertainment.

As soon as some members of her daughter's cadre of friends turned sixteen and got drivers' licenses, all of them began to gad about every weekend. They went to the mall, to sandwich and coffee shops, to each others' houses.... Sometimes they just drove around. Carla confessed that one Sunday afternoon, she, Jeanne and Debbie bought a pepperoni pizza, drove to an empty parking lot, and ate it in Jeanne's car during a downpour.

She understood it. She realized it sprang from their new independence, a result of their recently-earned ability to drive without supervision. Going out with friends, without having to convince an adult to enable the gatherings, was such a novelty at sixteen and seventeen, they still had not gotten their fill of it.

Fondly, she remembered her own college days. Somehow, she and her roommate and friends had filled their Friday and Saturday evenings, even though none of them had vehicles on campus, and none of them were old enough to go to the bars in the neighborhood nearby and drink. There was always something to do in the student union, and off-campus there were coffeehouses, where musicians and poets would sometimes perform. It had been a good time, and she hadn't missed her parents for a single minute.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary,
G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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