It was an accident, this missing of a familiar highway exit in my wife's childhood home in Massachusetts. And yet it wasn't an accident at all. We had arranged, on this return visit, to stay at a hotel in the area for the weekend of her brother's wedding.
The missed exit allowed us to circle back through her old neighborhood and show our son the monuments of her childhood. As we drove slowly down her old street, she was able to tick off the names of every family in every house and offer a catalog of their unique traits as well as the names and ages of all the kids with whom she once played. Our son, who is eight, asked a lot of questions from the back seat, obviously envious of his mom's adventurous past. When we were through making the loop, he said, "That was a really exciting neighborhood," the implication being, perhaps, that our own present suburban Connecticut neighborhood was somehow lacking.
And it is, in many important ways that can't necessarily be blamed on the town itself. The paranoia of parenting that exists today—between peanut butter fears, domestic terrorists and flu pandemics—just did not exist when my wife and I were kids. I could not help but notice on this trip how my wife as a child had near carte blanche to roam wherever and whenever she wanted, to skateboard, sled, bike, and even play near the railroad tracks—because, yes, if there are railroad tracks near any neighborhood in the world, kids are going to play on them. Her freedom was partly due to a "broken" home and a single working mom too tired each day to obsessively monitor the whereabouts of her three kids, and more likely just glad they were able to entertain themselves.
I had a similar scenario in my suburban neighborhood in Atlanta as part of a roving pack of ne'er-do-wells with fire crackers, rockets, soap and eggs. It didn't matter to me who my mates were. I was just glad to have someone, anyone, with whom to roam, to be out of my house, where a mentally unstable father drank his miseries away. While my wife fondly recalls her childhood, I cannot say that I do the same. That is, I could not orchestrate a similar tour for our son in my old haunts. For they were indeed "haunts"—trap doors into a dark past I still feel the need to escape. So I am more than happy to borrow my wife's past as a sort of shared surrogate memory marked "childhood."
But here is our son, trying to grope his way in the world. He has never voluntarily, by himself, walked outside to explore his own natural surroundings in our perfectly safe neighborhood. He has been lathered in the fear of the unknown that pervades our culture. When we are home he constantly needs to know where we are in the house, like a game of Marco Polo.
"Daddy." Silence. "Daddy!" (louder). Finally, I say, "Yes, what do you want?"
"Nothing," he says, mollified. "I just wanted to know where you are."
This is the same boy who used to ask me questions like "Will the universe end?" and "What's the number right before you get to infinity?" I am now trying to cobble together a childhood for him from our own broken pieces of wood. It is the hardest job I've ever had to do, but I don't want to miss a minute of it.
Due to limited resources and a redoubled commitment to local and regional reporting, the Valley Advocate has decided to stop running this column. I thank all my readers, even the most vociferous detractors, for hanging in there with me. Valley readers, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and Vermont, are uniformly passionate about important issues that we all face and committed to community.
I will continue to be a contributor to the Valley Advocate on a less regular basis, and in a different vein. And my column, in a different form, will continue to run in the Hartford Advocate.
