Better Times

BACK IN 1959, when I was, oh, what... um....four years old, I ran around the neighborhood at will. Nice, quiet, middle to lower middle class hood, and off we went, the other kids and I, my sister, three years older, and two or three neighbor kids, all second grade or younger, just hanging out, running around, hide and seek, tag, play doctor, play nurse, this front porch, that front porch, warm summer evenings, after dark.

There is no way mom and dad could possibly have known exactly where we were, and they were not in the least worried about it. Nobody was. All the neighbors knew each other, a police car was a rare sight, and nothing bad ever happened. When mom stepped onto the porch, cupped her hands and  called, sometime after sun set, we scampered home, and that was that.

I  remember we would play doctor , nurse, and dog, a sort of post - toddler role playing soap opera. I, the youngest, got to be the dog, and I loved it.

Around the age of ten, dad gave sis and me BB guns; we each got our own rifle, and about that time all the other kids got guns too. We ran around the hood shooting the place up. Birds and squirrels were not safe, and neither were horse apples, those big green things hanging from beau d'arc trees, whose wood is the hardest in the world. You shot one, and it dripped, and dripped, beautifully.

Neither were we safe. It was neither cowboys and indians, nor krauts and yanks, but just us, two teams, firing away at each other from what we thought was a fairly safe distance. It wasn't. I took one in the lower left leg, and it hurt like hell, and made a little bloody circle, even through thick starched blue jeans. I was proud of it, but never showed mom. thus I kept my BB rifle. I almost wish I had one now.

One of the bottle rocket fights cost me a scar right over my right eye. Lucky kid, huh?

You try that stuff now and you're in jail. And no middle class neighborhood is gonna have four and five year olds running around unsupervised.

Its a different america now. Is it better, or worse? I guess it depends on whether you're a kid. Somehow I just don't see myself at ten, punching the remote control, playing games on my Ipod...