I was raised in one of the last ‘go out and play’ generations. Our mothers not only ‘let us’ go out and play when our minimal chores and, later, less minimal homework was done, they couldn’t wait. They spent hours in the morning cleaning floors and dishes, making beds, starting casseroles and so forth and the one thing that can really mess that up is, you guessed it, kids.
I grew up in Los Angeles where the weather is pretty mild most of the time. We did have the occasional monsoon with school closures and flooding, earthquakes, days so hot and brown with smog it felt like walking through a chemical fire, also chemical and wild fires, but apart from those days, it was warm and beautiful and we could go out and play.
It was also safe to go out and play or at least our parents, and we thought that it was. I lived on Mariposa Avenue. I was not allowed to cross Franklin Avenue, at the top of my street, or Hollywood Boulevard at the bottom without holding the hand of an adult. However, I was allowed to walk all by myself around the corner to Normandie, where my best friend Susan lived, or even two blocks further to Kent where my second best friend, Karen lived as long as I didn’t cross the verboten intersections. In groups of twos and threes we walked to school six blocks away and sometimes even further.
We lived in a tiny kingdom of children in a sprawling metropolis about which I knew almost nothing.
Within that kingdom, we and our friends ruled the streets. We crossed the streets with pretty much wild abandon, we roller skated, built forts behind the incinerator in yards where we were welcome, climbed out Gerry’s window onto the fire escape in the back, followed it up and down and eventually climbed back through another friend, Linda’s open window and made our way back to the sidewalk with no one ever spotting us.
No one was looking. We lived in an era of benign neglect. In all those yards and bathrooms, among all those parents and other adults, I can’t believe there wasn’t the odd dope addict (we already knew the drunk one, Mark’s mom, Mrs. Clark, (she was super sweet and always had sugar cookies). child abuser, errant murderer or otherwise troubled adult. Statistically, it just doesn’t made sense.
But the blind trust and unstudied, collective disregard of the knowledge of possible consequences must have protected us, the way it sometimes does for people tripping on Acid, mushrooms or simple alcohol and despair.
All love and gratitude to you, sweet god of careless neglect and carefree, sunlit afternoons, of near misses and happy accidents and of the ever mysterious world of childhood bliss