It's a Different World….Or is it?

     I was eight years old and in fourth grade the day it happened.  I was walking to school one morning and had just gotten to that larger-than-usual lot six houses up from mine, when I noticed the large, black car driving slowly next to me.  I looked over, and saw that the passenger side window was down.  The driver, a man with dark, slicked back hair was saying something to me, but I hadn’t heard him.  I paused, and took one step closer to the car. “Excuse me?” I said politely.

     “Do you want to earn ten bucks easy?” The man repeated, his voice quiet, urging me to move closer.

     “Oh, uhm, no thanks.” I said simply and I continued walking. 

     I wasn’t scared. In fact, I was almost certain that he meant raking leaves.  I didn’t like to rake leaves, and I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, so I figured that raking his leaves was out of the question.  It was a no brainer. I met my friend Randi at the corner as usual and we walked the remaining two blocks to school.  The conversation with the man in the black car never came up.  It just didn’t seem important to me. 

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     I didn’t trust my memory, so I asked my mom about this the other day:

     “Mom, how old was I when I began walking to school by myself?”

     “What do you mean?” She began, mildly incredulous. “You always walked by yourself!”

      “You didn’t walk me? Even in Kindergarten?” I prodded.

      “Of course not. Well, maybe the first day. All you kids walked.”     

     It wasn’t a long walk.  The equivalent of about three blocks. Sometimes I walked with my brother, who was three years older than I was. Eventually, I began to walk part of the way with a friend who lived on the top half of my long, oak-tree lined street.  She met me at the halfway point. There were exactly seven houses between my house and the corner where I met her. Between the sixth and seventh house there was a larger-than-usual lot that had even more oak trees. I remember that when I first began walking to school by myself, I was little enough to be terrorized by an unruly gang of squirrels who hung out there in the autumn months.  Every day, when I got to that part of the sidewalk next to the larger-than-usual lot, I stopped and watched them dart around, frantically collecting acorns. At times we’d reach a kind of stand-off, the squirrels staring me down like delinquent teenagers until I’d gather my nerve to take off and run straight through them, often in tears.

       I am from a generation that did not have formal “play-dates”.  We went outside.  We found the other kids who were outside.  We played until it got dark, or our mothers called us home.  The house I grew up in sat in a kind of small suburban valley bordered on two sides by sloping hills.  The houses on my side of the block all had small backyards that ended in a narrow wooded area that rose up and separated them from the backyards the next block over. I spent countless hours in there, playing hide and seek, looking for fossils, collecting leaves or filing jars with lightning bugs.  I played often with the boy next door and we called it “the jungle.”  One summer morning, I filled my father’s Marine canteen with water and we took it with us. All afternoon, we were explorers in the jungle, carefully rationing out the water in that canteen so that we would “survive.”   

     Another time, convinced that we had seen a snake slither down between the roots of a tree, we snuck back into the house just long enough to grab two towels and two pieces of lined paper before heading back out.  We didn’t hear our mothers calling to us at dinner time, but I will never forget the sound of his mom’s laughter as she described to mine how she had found us sitting cross-legged beside the tree trunk, towels wrapped around our heads, blowing into sheets of paper rolled up like “flutes,” which we were pretending to play in an attempt to charm the snake back out of the hole.

     The most trouble I ever got in as a kid happened when I was six years old. I was a couple of blocks over at my friend Patti’s house when we decided we wanted to go to the park.  The park, however, was an off-limits trip for me without a grownup.  The park meant crossing Lakeside Avenue, a wide, four-lane mini-highway at the bottom of Patti’s street.  I called my mom to ask if I could go.  Her answer was a firm, “No.”  In an uncharacteristically brazen attempt to persuade her to change her mind, I pushed her, pointing out quite reasonably that Patti was seven.  Mom wasn’t having it though, and she proceeded to launch into an equally rare explanation of why.  She told me that Lakeside Avenue was too dangerous for a six and seven year old to navigate alone.

   If asking her twice was unlike me, what I did next was just sheer lunacy:  I went anyway.  I went, and have this picture in my mind of Patti and me, smiling as we walked, single file, with our arms outstretched for balance, as though on a tight-rope, along a log at the edge of the lake when Billy, Patti’s brother, came running toward us across an open field like Paul Revere, yelling, “Tricia! Tricia! Your mother knows you’re at the park!  She knows and she’s coming for you!” 

     Holy Mary, Mother of God.  This was bad.  This was very, very bad.  Thiswas scary.  Another child might have tried to run or hide.  I knew that my only choice was to go home and face it.  I walked up Morningside Road and turned right onto South Prospect Street, where I saw her at the other end walking toward me.  I trudged toward her, walking the proverbial “Green Mile.”  Suffice it to say that for at least a week, my sore rear end was a daily reminder of the consequences for being sneaky and defiant.  And of course, in addition to breaking one of the few rules she had about where I could play, I had scared her. My dad had a little joke about mothers in general, saying that in these circumstances, “That which doesn’t kill you, gives her the right to.”

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     Randi and I were in the same class.  When we arrived at school on the day the man in the black car spoke to me, our teacher, Mrs. DeJohn, chose Randi to begin “Show and Tell.”  Usually, Show and Tell consisted of a half hour of kids holding up cool snow globes from Disney, or a really sweet piece of quartz from a museum gift store that would make everyone wish that they too, had one.  Not that day.  That day, Randi stood up in front of the class and toldthe exact same story about being approached by a man in a black car as what I had experienced.  Funny thing was, at that moment, lots of smiling little 4thgrade girls started eagerly waving their hands saying, “Me too!” It seemed exciting!  We looked at one another, marveling at this thrilling coincidence. None of us really noticed at first that Mrs. DeJohn had walked quickly out of the classroom to the main office down the hall.

     That night, I was in my PJs ready for bed when the doorbell rang.  We rarely had evening visitors, so there were plenty of questioning looks between my siblings and parents as they went to open the door. A few minutes later, I was sitting on the couch between two large police officers, feeling very self-conscious in my pajamas, looking at hundreds of pages of mug shots in a big black binder. 

     I didn’t choose the right guy, which later on, wasn’t surprising to me at all.  I hadn’t really paid attention to him.  The fact that he stopped me and asked me that question seemed a bit odd I suppose, but there didn’t seem to be anything menacing about it.  To be honest, those squirrels terrified me a hell of a lot more. I didn’t pick up on danger at all.  And as I write this, I think of my 10 year-old daughter, who is two years older than I was at the time and the hair on the back of my neck stands at attention.

    Randi was the one who “caught” him.  A few days later, she saw him again.  This time, she was able to point him out to her mom, who called the police right away and they picked him up.  Turns out he was a pretty scary guy.  Adults were tossing around words in low voices like pedophile, and child pornographer, and then they’d glance over at us kids, pointedly turn their heads the other way, and speak in whispers.   

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     My youngest, Elizabeth, has always ridden the bus to school.  Her bus stop used to be at the nearest corner to our house, which is visible from our dining room windows. Until this year, I walked her, and waited with her-and never considered allowing her to do this alone.  In fact, on those days that she took the bus home, if there were no parent waiting for her, they wouldn’t have let her get off the bus either.

     This is the world we live in now.  

     This year, the bus picks her up directly across the street from our front door.  It was a significant rite of passage that, as a big 5th grader, she asked if she could walk to the bus stop and wait alone.  Doing this was a point of pride with her for the first month or so of school, and then a few weeks ago, just prior to the announcement that the famed New York WNEW DJ, Dave Herman, was arrested for attempting to transport a 7-year-old to St. Croix with the intent to engage in sexual activity with her, there were two attempted “lurings” of young girls in our town.  Parents were notified immediately via mass emails, and the kids were told too. The next morning, I watched as she walked down the front walk and crossed the street to wait.  I had just closed the front door and was standing in front of the dining room windows scanning the empty opposite side of the street for her when, before I had a chance to panic, the doorbell rang.  I opened the door to find her there, shaking and crying, saying, “I’m scared.  Come with me.” 

     I hate the fact that she is afraid.  I hate that when she asks to go play by the creek behind our house I say yes with a twinge of uneasiness I doubt my mother ever had.   I hate that when her very best friend moved from the house next door to a couple of blocks over, she lost the ability to just yell, “I’m going to Lulu’s,” and walk out the back door.  I hate that I sometimes feel like the “helicopter parent,” overprotective with an overactive imagination.  I hate that those emails fuel that fear.   

     I think that I had a much simpler childhood.  But did I?  Dave Herman is  77 years old for God’s sake.  How many women my age owe their damaged bodies and psyches to that particular monster?  Were we just naïve?  Or is it the fact that things like this were only spoken of in whispers?  That parents whose children were victimized made sure that they were also “protected,” so that they weren’t stigmatized as well.  “Protected” translates to a generation of kids who were told not to talk about it.  Who were molested, and then silenced without explanation. 

     What that translates to, is a nightmare I cannot imagine, and I realize that while I do not want my child to live in fear, I’m glad she is more cautious than I felt the need to be.  We talk often about the idea that no adult stranger ever needs her “help”, and if she really believes they do, that she should say, “I’ll be right back with my mom/dad.”

     I wish she’d come in the house more often with the smell of fall leaves in her hair after playing outside for hours.  I wish her biggest fear had to do with a constellation of gray squirrels racing around her, or her mother’s wrath for breaking the rules.  She doesn’t know the specifics, but I could tell by her reaction that morning that she understands that there are other, more sinister things to be afraid of, and it comforts me and breaks my heart in equal measure.