"Return home when the street lights come on."
With that admonition, in my eighth year my parents stepped aside and gave me permission to roam the city. I rode my new bike everywhere: to school, to friends' houses, to parks, to our 7-11, to the trash bins behind the supermarket. Other kids my age were also being emancipated from the apron strings, sent out into the world on their new bikes. Together we formed packs, we hung-out, we met kids from other tracts, we learned to avoid the big kids and the bad kids.
It was an age of exploration, miles of city, suburbs and countryside open to restless, reckless, feckless youth seeking respite from the constant boredom of our homes.
Once we found an abandoned rope swing hanging from a tree overlooking a canyon. You'd grab the rope, get a running start and pull yourself onto the rotting seat as the swing swung out over the canyon floor hundreds of feet below. Another time we bought a box of M-80s from some older kids and spent the next few weeks blowing up anything we could find, from old beer bottles to rotten watermelons retrieved from the trash bins behind the supermarket. We'd play pick-up baseball, over-the-line if we didn't have enough kids. We'd often just hang around doing nothing until it was time to return home.
We lived in a world we made.
Today we constantly monitor our kids with Secret Service-level protection while we plot and plan every detail of their lives, filling their calendars with playdates and scheduled activities. I'm beginning to comprehend the magnitude of our irresponsibility.
wats hood
Posted by: nica | February 06, 2005 at 12:22 PM