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I have mixed emotions about
the care with which we watch our children. I want them to be safe,
but I also want them to enjoy their childhood.
I sure enjoyed mine.
A little bit Tom Sawyer, a little bit Great Brain, a little bit Where
the Red Fern Grows.
Like in these classic books,
we were free to run. Everywhere. Without telling our parents
every step of our journey. They just shooed us out of the house in the
morning, which we didn't fight because that was before the invention
of sedentary indoor activities for kids. If you wanted to play,
you did it outside.
We could do that, play outside
without adult supervision, because danger hadn't been invented yet.
We explored abandoned sheds,
local canyons, strange fields. This was before the invention of
tetanus, and wolves, and kidnappers.
We played with our Geiger counter,
running it over the large rocks of uranium that we had brought home
from our trips to southern Utah. We got a kick out of the machine
gun response to the shiny green element. We passed it around from neighbor
to neighbor. This was before radioactivity was invented.
And we told stories of sighting
the town exhibitionist. Once by my brother, my friend and I were
up playing in the fields behind the Sand Dam—the local swimming hole—oh
yeah, this was before water safety was necessary. I never remember
seeing an adult there. Just a lot of kids, swimming and diving
in the murky water.
Anyway, as we hiked around
the hills, we saw him, wearing only tennis shoes. “Have you seen my
clothes?" he asked us. "I was swimming at the
Sand Dam and somebody stole them.” We told him no, we hadn't
seen them. And then we turned and ran.
Today, the police, bloodhounds,
neighborhood vigilantes, would all be combing the hills for the pervert.
A warning would be put out on the local news channels. People would
be debating all across the airwaves what we should do about this problem.
But to us, he was just a town character, like the town drunk.
Oh yeah, the town drunk.
That's a whole ‘nother story.
Posted in May, 2008
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