In dogged pursuit

The unnamed roadways on the Island De Vieques pushed northward in steep elevation along the coastline, and I pushed myself up their pockmarked surfaces at as steady a pace as I could muster. 

It was the last day of our acquaintance, and I was saying farewell to the lovely and rugged place with a final jog around the neighborhood. 

It wasn't my first ride on this particular carousel. but I was still wary. 

During the six days I'd been here, I had gotten lost at least twice and encountered a host of curious animals -- everything from hermit crabs and iguanas to wild horses.

Most of them ignored my intrusion once they realized the things I carried – a phone, a beach towel, a pair of sunglasses – contained no nutritional value. 

But nothing frightened me more than the dogs that roamed loose. I had kept a lookout for them, making note of places I'd seen the scruffier ones linger in hopes of avoiding any unwanted surprises. I took pains to scuff my feet on the gravel as loudly as possible, doing so I hoped would herald my whereabouts.

I was having success: 

I startled a shaggy mixed breed that looked like a relative of Little Orphan Annie’s pooch (1982 Movie not the ‘76 Broadway Musical) but he deduced I was harmless and continued on his merry way, nosing through some litter. 

I came face to snout with Old Yeller’s clone and got the distinct message (from his raised hackles and continuous growl) that he did not want me to pass anywhere near his humble abode. So I turned on my zero-drop heels and went along MY merry way.

Then there was the adorable pair of teacup pooches of the fluffy variety all alone in front at the boutique hotel just a few doors down from where I'd ventured out, and where my relatives were still sleeping akimbo. The pups looked comfortable and fetching in their matching outfits and bejeweled collars. But as I approached the place where I imagined their relatives were still checking out, they snarled and bared their teeth. 

Circling back. 

I'll just cut over on the nearest side street and cross my fingers that it will connect with the broader loop. I've already run one and a half miles; one and a half more would scratch the itch. 

It's restful here. The air is warm but not heavy. The hills give and take. The traffic I encounter of the automotive variety never reaches top speed thanks to narrow roadways laden with speed bumps. 

I am at the bottom of a steep hill and jogging upward, having almost completed my second circle when I hear some commotion behind me. 

The jingle of collars, nails scraping the pavement, and barks that travel through deep chests. 

There are two of them. 

I am afraid to look back. Afraid to lock eyes. But I know. They have different gaits and their growls have different pitches.

I instinctively stop running, knowing I can't outrun them but hoping that slowing down will give all of us more time to think. 

But I don't dawdle. I set my sights on the top of the hill and push the pace.

“Stay calm,” said the voice in my head who was telling me what I already knew: a pack of dogs that would ambush me from behind was not interested in playing. 

I feel one of the dogs touch the back of my knee. It feels like the dry lips of a horse flapping at a palm hoping to slurp a handful of something tasty. And then came the pressure. Not a bite. Maybe the swipe of a heavy paw?

I wish I had a rock to throw at their broadsides. Even if I might miss. Chances are fair that at least one of them might trade the chase for an instinctive game of fetch. 

In my escalating panic, the voice of actor Matthew McConaughey comes rushing out of my mouth like it's air from a punctured tire. 

“ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT … I've got no intention of moving in on your action.” 

And like movie magic, once the three of us reached the top of the hill, the dogs turned back and disappeared into parts unknown.

I took off running. 

Plane air

 The temperature got warmer all of a sudden. 

Up until that moment during the three-and-a-half-hour flight, the plane had felt drafty and frigid. I imagined we had crossed some point in the world between the arctic North and tropical South, though I could only make an estimation based on elapsed time. 

I certainly hadn't ponied up for WiFi. 

I might have asked my husband where the dashes and dots appeared on the map as if such movie icons could materialize in real-time. But he had drawn the long straw assigned seating and managed a bulkhead seat that might as well have been a lounge chair for all the space it gave him. 

He tried to make my side of the sardine can more comfortable by offering to share one of his wireless earbuds so I could at least listen to a movie he had downloaded … but I demurred. I didn't want to listen to things explode. 

I'm already an anxious traveler. 

So I fidgeted in my aisle seat, vacillating between playing games of backgammon on my phone and pretending to doze off. 

The girl had the window and was tapping away at her screen. Earphones blot out the jet stream of sounds recirculating in the cabin, which range from mechanical to mucousy. 

The boy, a monkey in our middle, had fallen asleep on this flight and the one before it. His head wobbled from side to side as the plane shimmied from one pocket of turbulence to another. 

The two of us wagered the odds of him sleeping through the third and final leg of the journey. Magic 8 Ball says: “All Signs Point To Yes.”

A steady stream of fellow passengers mill past us to get to the lavatories. They navigate past without grazing any part of my person. They are careful and I have tucked my arms in between the armrests. 

I have learned from the man who doffed the head of a woman sitting on her suitcase near the moving sidewalk as he dangled his arm over the handrail. 

Jerks. Forever sprawling past their fair share of space.  

My husband, sensing my angry thoughts, pulls his elbows into his body. He doesn't notice I am telegraphing instructions to return his seat to its upright position for landing.

From my mind to the flight attendant’s mouth. He pretends he didn't notice though everyone knows great wars have been waged over that angled inch. 

Turns out we were six miles above sea level and headed into our descent.

The cabin lights switch off as the Fasten Seatbelt sign comes to life with a crystal-tinked ding.

It occurred to me then, that the whole ride had been a breeze. Not once had the baby in the seat ahead of us, who had smiled beatifically as he was bounced and juggled between his equally placid parents, seemed disgruntled. Not once did my own children argue. And not once did I  wish minor, irritating harm on my fellow man.

We all just seemed to float effortlessly, harmoniously together.

And before I knew it we had landed, smooth as silk. Passengers erupt into applause of appreciation. I hadn't even been worried. Now I was grateful.

 

Not worth the gamble

I know I wasn't hallucinating. 

I had been under the influence of sedation, but I had concrete proof. 

Five years ago, after my first big milestone screening test – the one that no one remembers but ends with a report complete with the most colorful but least scenic tourism photography imaginable – my lower digestive tract was declared completely unremarkable except for the appearance of a redundancy – an “extra loop” – which had put a gleam in the doctor’s eye, and which he assured me was not abnormal nor would preclude me from membership in the elusive 10-year club. 

“Congratulations.”

It felt like I had won the lottery.

But the form letter that arrived in the mail just a few weeks ago was an unexpected invitation to take the sightseeing journey early.

“Oh yes,” the lady who answered the phone said when I asked about why they were taking away half my lottery winnings and making me spin the wheel again. “I see that your recall was shortened. Probably happened during a review of your files when your doctor retired. You could postpone …”

“Or I could just get it over with, and not spend the next five years wondering what could be growing unchecked in the recesses of my ascending colon.”

“Probably not worth the gamble.”

So I made the appointment, which turned out to be two days after Christmas. 

And though I tried to keep it all very hush-hush, buying the preparations on the sly, and keeping my nervous energy in check, my secret was discovered when the boy found bottles of electrolytes hidden in a cabinet behind the lunch boxes.

“So when is the colonoscopy?”

Why would you think that?

“Because you never buy Gatorade, and Grandma never buys Gatorade, but I found it in her house last summer and she said she had just had a colonoscopy.”

“It’s two days after Christmas.”

“That's a pretty crappy gift … all puns intended.”

Yes … and no.

The prep is a time-consuming process that requires precision. And test anxiety is ever-present. 

But in my experience, and as strange as it seems, there are more uncomfortable procedures than colonoscopy. And since it's truly preventative, the test can also be a treatment, preventing cancer before it begins. 

The hardest part, for me, has always been having to coordinate a driver. 

If it were an option, I would prefer to wait out the drug-induced delirium and drive myself home.

As it is, I will have to suffer the slings and arrows of my husband telling jokes, ad nauseam, about the funny things I said or did while under the influence of sedation. 

But, thanks to pandemic protocols, he was waiting in the parking lot and not in attendance to witness me waking up drowsily in recovery. 

Even if I danced on top of the nurses’ station, he wasn't there to see it, so the question of it happening would be moot anyway. 

As it turned out, the big day was just another Wednesday in December. With a mid-morning nap, unremarkable results, and my new place in the Five-Year Club celebrated as solid.  

Season's Greetings

 Tomorrow we will sleep in.

That's the plan, anyway.

Tonight we are neither on guard nor on our best behavior. There will be at least four cheeky arguments over which holiday movie is the one WE ALWAYS (or WE NEVER) watch on Christmas Eve. (It's NOT Waking Ned Devine, no matter what my husband says.)

Santa's workshop - also known as the downstairs guest bedroom, where parental elves have toiled into the wee hours on the 24th day of December for the last two decades – has finally experienced the sluggishness of an aging demographic. 

There aren't mountains of gifts to sift through anymore. There is nothing to assemble. Any wrapping we might do is quite actually the work of but a moment. 

(There's plenty of time for wine).

I count myself fortunate that this shift to something smaller hasn't resulted in big or hard feelings. 

Not only have our children matured beyond the stage of development where they are salty that Santa’s magic has always been connected to their parents by cartoonishly visible nylon strings, but we Middle-Agers are salty that we awaken before dawn, whether we want to or not, without any impish joy.

They wake up slowly, wanting warm liquids and breakfast before commencing a round-robin style gift delivery they see as tradition.

“Did you know some people just go all in … they just find their names and start shredding?” my daughter says when I ask her to tell me her favorite part of Christmas morning. “I love that it takes us all day to get through the same amount of presents others tear through in minutes. It’s just nice.”

And she misses what we all miss: Grandpa setting up his toy trains under the tree, and Grandma nagging him to “let the kids play engineer, for goodness sake!”

For all the things we lose in this life, there are so many things still to find.

For instance, I find myself in a new camaraderie with strangers in snippets of overheard conversations. 

I want to high-five the man at the jewelry store shopping for a gift for his daughter who is finally home for the holidays. 

I want to hug the lady at the supermarket who was buying a sweet treat for a loved one in hospice. 

I can reread every letter my kids wrote to Santa from memory as I walk past the families waiting in line at the Shopping Mall’s North Pole.

I am grateful my girl is home. And that we will talk late into the night. I will rejoice that for the brief time between now and New Year, she will drive her brother anywhere he wants to go; and he won't drive her crazy. 

It seems like every Christmas we've ever shared is playing on a loop. 

I feel so lucky I want to knock on wood. 

By the time we are ready to sleep again, we will have laughed, cried, and chatted late into the night with the favorite members of our far-flung families. We will have heard old stories and told some with details that seem entirely new. 

We won't want the season to end.

Accepting a different kind of festive

The house looks like it always does. There are mountains of clean laundry piled on chairs throughout the downstairs rooms waiting to be folded. Dishes in the sink that have yet to be stacked in the dishwasher. And there are bits of debris from snacks of toast and crackers strewn about the carpet like confetti that need to be vacuumed. 

It's a different kind of festive this year. 

The only things here that are reminiscent of a traditional winter holiday season are a garland of some variety of ever-plastic greenery and a sign wishing all who enter a Merry Christmas. Both of which have managed to lurk in their respective haunts perennially. 

The cards, ordered late, have arrived but haven't been processed for mailing. A single round of holiday baking has occurred, but my resolve to plan more has ebbed. 

Ordinarily, we would have a Christmas tree by now. Procured by the time the sun had set on Black Friday. The six-foot balsam would be shedding its needles all over the carpet while the dog and cats would be drinking out of its Christmas-flavored water receptacle. In addition to vacuuming up pine scent on the daily, I would be playing a never-ending game of picking up decorations from the floor and returning them to the low-hanging branches, from whence the cat had scattered them.  

I know it's just timing. What with the daughter off at college, not scheduled to return until just about the time Santa is supposed to be finalizing his lists; And the boy being in absolute solidarity for waiting. 

 But this new compression has also seemed to wring some of the joy from my holiday heart, leaving me with a complicated math of emptying the storage compartment of all our ancient ornament just in time to put them all away within a fortnight. 

Honestly, I wondered about this day. 

The first Christmas that slopes with me into middle age. 

The first Christmas that'll light has dimmed from childhood joy. Where there are fewer gifts to buy and cards to send. Fewer place settings at the table. And yet despite this winnowing, somehow, even the littlest thing will feel like a gargantuan chore.

I mean … I don't even know if those lazy snowflake light cannons work anymore let alone where in the garage they might have landed. 

I certainly would have noticed if I'd had to 

mow around them. 

Or at least I think I would.

This all rattles around in my brain as I sit amid friends during the coffee talk portion of our mid-week run.

Talk of miles and ailments has ended and the banter of baseball starts to wane. Christmas takes its place. The cost of a live tree is only a momentary complaint before postcards from our pasts start to sail around the table. 

Who among us hedged their bets at the tree farm by leaving a glove on a contender only to have misplaced the tree and the glove? Who was the earliest riser on Christmas morning and whose mom let them open just one present? What was the strangest tradition?

By the end of the hour, I had absorbed so many sweet secrets, that it felt as if I had been visited by the ghosts of my own Christmas’ - past, present, and future. 

And I felt more relaxed. I don't have to be ready, I just have to remember.

A lock on time

Who is that woman? 

Her hair, frizzy and dry, was a tri-blend of color that needed … at the very least … a bit of attention. 

She looked vaguely familiar but I avoided making eye contact. It’s a small place. It would be awkward, if not painful, to stare directly into the mirror. 

If this had been a campground, I would have been the tent pole; with a full circle of fabric cascading around my neck, covering the place I inhabit almost entirely. I held my phone between my two hands, prayer style. I could still feel its warmth even if I couldn’t read the screen. Like the fire.

It might be nice to be small under the stars. Quiet-like. 

The young woman who had welcomed me motioned to a seat and then disappeared into a back room to collect materials. The place was abuzz with activity. Soft music played while scissor blades whisked against each other. Conversation floated above us in gentle waves. 

Before long, she selected strands of my hair, parted and stretched them, then painted and folded each piece between sheets of colorful foil. Layering upward, the woman peering back at me from the mirror looked like she was wearing the roof of a pagoda as a hat.

She is quick efficient and naturally personable. She takes her work so seriously that she uses her spare time to prepare.

“Oh, I didn't have much of an interest in the Barbie movie, myself, but I knew it would be something my clients might want to talk about, so I thought it would be good to see it.”

The women in chairs all around me talked about their families. Their pets. The best things to watch on Netflix. They upsold travels and downplayed travails. Keeping the conversation steady and effortless. 

With cordiality considered there seemed to be no unsafe subjects.

It occurred to me as I sat there in my tinfoil hat, waiting for science and artistry to transform the cantankerous keratinous filaments I had too long ignored, that the so-called journey had led me here kicking and screaming. 

Far far too long, this ritual of self had felt like just another chore. And a chore that could also be fraught with personal failure under the gaze of a professional. 

And although I stopped coloring (and trimming) my own hair long ago, I have not managed to keep these tresses any better managed. Nor have I ceased worrying that the state of its split ends and tangles shouldn't be justification for semi-public shaming, But I have accepted my age and the changes it has visited upon my hair and I have committed to increasing the number of visits I make to the professionals per annum. At least two times as we go around the sun. 

“How has it taken me so long to prioritize,” I wonder each time I leave the salon and sit in my car. My hair feels lighter. Younger. Full of possibilities. And if I squint I can almost recognize the girl in my rearview mirror.

Adulting in Z formation

“When you come can you bring one of the air mattresses?” 

An undulating college commute for the holidays - where we spend a few non-continuous weekends together as a family here and there before a month-long respite takes hold -  was underway and negotiations were getting heated. 

“I could” … I retorted cheekily. “But why do you want it?”

“We need something to sit on … and something for people to sleep on if they stay over,” she replied, reasonably enough. The months-long season of multi-festivity was coming in fits and starts, but the one thing she has this year that she didn't have last term was a place to keep her stuff during the interim.

Though she is living in a dorm, I would tell anyone who asks that she and her roommates live in a pretty “epic” apartment. 

Wording it that way makes me feel as if my own salad days weren’t so long ago.

Now, I never lived in a fifth-floor corner city apartment with secure access and hardwood floors. I didn’t have a balcony-like window that looked out lovingly over my campus.

But I did have a windowless room in a basement that was all my own, even if it was more than seventeen blocks away.

And I NEVER would have asked my mother to donate the old folding cot in the basement to my cause to find accommodation and party furnishings.  

I would have resorted to doing what all the countless Xers of my Generation did - take a walking tour of the better neighborhoods on trash day. 

That is, after all, how I procured one AMAZING mid-century modern sectional couch with a Hollywood Regency flair that lasted more than a dozen years – through one party after another, one apartment after another – all the way into the new century. 

And I would still have it now if I hadn’t felt the call of nostalgia and released the blonde, jacquard beauty to a new generation of college students one fateful trash day. 

But that is not how Gen Z rolls. Afterall, my daughter points out, there are epidemics of bed bugs and other forever-pests to think about now.

“One of the air mattresses will be fine,” she says with a heavy sigh, as if wading through my nostalgia were the physical equivalent of swimming the English Channel. 

“Or … it would have been fine if the dog didn’t puncture the thing last time we had guests,” I said, narrating the sudden memory I had miraculously withdrawn from my post-pandemic memory bank and accepted as true without the arduous task of investigating the evidence so as to avoid doing a thorough search of all 11 tote bags in bottom of the front hall closet where the thing is probably jammed.

“How about I get you a bean bag lounger instead … Did you know companies make human size dog beds now? They are so versatile. They can be a lounger, or a couch, or a bed.”

“I know! We live in WILD times.”

“The only thing wilder would be if a drone had delivered the 40-pound, vacuum-packed box to your balcony window within the five- to seven-day shipping window. … As it is, we’re going to need your brother’s help to schlep it up the stoop and into the elevator.”

“I’m sure dragging it out to the sidewalk on move-out day will be much easier.”

Togetherness

 We separated this holiday season. 

I took one kid and a carload of stuff.

He took the dog, and the pickup truck, and a trailer with an old rusted tractor riding on top, the kind that could weather an apocalypse and be in working order for any surviving organisms with opposable thumbs to use its mower deck and horsepower to rid their gardens of choking bittersweet.

“Working the tractor requires a little more finesse than that,” he’d say if he were reading over my shoulder right now. 

But he is not. 

There is nothing fair about my feelings. 

I downplay his lofty intentions on this family weekend to wax defensive about the straw I had pulled. It was my job to pick up all the humans after the workday had ended, whether at home or in Boston and drive them to Maine.

I was not looking forward to the task: the traffic, the crosswalks, and people leaning on car horns. I was not sure I could be the aggressive driver I needed to be to muscle my way through rush hour. I imagined we’d be driving for days. 

But I didn't say anything.

I just listened to him go on about wanting to get in at least one day’s work at his mom’s house before the rain and the rest of the family descended for a festive weekend.

His parting words gave me hope, though I feel guilty about wishing.

“Maybe I'll pick up the girl in the city on my way. That way it would be a straight shot for you.”

My heart skipped a beat. 

If you do that PLEASE take a picture. I want to see you pull up to the dorm towing a beat-up Massey Furguson through Bean Town. 

A truly Tom Sawyer move. Painting this fence would be so much fun!

He said he would keep me posted.

But he didn't. Staying vigilant about the sway of his heavy load was foremost in his mind.

I didn't hear a peep from the college student either. 

So I stalk them both using the surveillance powers of Find My Phone. His dot traveled steadily along the Mass Pike, while hers hovered over the address she proudly calls home. 

“I knew when your dot was in your dorm

and his dot was zooming up 290 that your twains would not meet. So I will be hunting down Huntington tomorrow.”

She blinked twice and narrowed her eyes.

WOops.

“How often do you use location services to find me,” she asked.

I had broken the first rule in cyberstalking: Talking about cyberstalking. Don’t let on that you know she was at El Jefe’s at midnight last Friday night. 

It’s not as if your intent was nefarious. 

You never intended to call her out for her choices. You just liked knowing her dot was out there somewhere that I could still see and feel connected. Even if only remotely so.

And of course, I imagined she got the churros and that were cooked to perfection with just the right amount of cinnamon sugar.

On this, I hope, we can come together. 

Well enough

 The clicker isn't working.

I rattle it against my hand. Twice. Then I try again.

This time it turns the television on, but it won't change channels or lower the volume.

The batteries are probably losing their juice. It's been a few minutes since the loud, announcer voice started repeating the intro to a broadcast I don't want to see. It might be a show or a movie or a swatch of the news. It doesn't matter. 

I could probably get used to the narration repeating if I focus on closing my ears. It occurs to me that I don't have the stamina right now to process new things. 

And I don't want to get up. 

I am comfortable under a blanket on the couch: a putty-colored throw that is filled with down but otherwise nondescript. It is more subdued than the one made of t-shirts that my husband prefers, or the green woolen Mexican blanket that is older than our marriage. The longer it stays, the harder it is to jettison. 

 

My blanket is different, though. It is timeless. It blends in so well it seems invisible. It has no weight. It has no color. And I have no recollection of its purchase. It just appeared one day when I was cleaning out a closet. 

The moment I saw it I had an urge to hold it to my face. Rubbing it against my cheek. It felt uncommonly soft and smelled of cedar. It came as a surprise when it spoke to me. 

I felt like I'd just met an old friend. A friend I do not wish to offend.

Like I did my old hand mixer - the one I bought at a hardware shop one Thanksgiving eve when I was in my early 20s. 

It was in my first apartment, hosting my first holiday dinner but it had never been my job to make the mashed potatoes. Now it was. In addition to the delicate-fleshed yellow gold spuds, I selected the Easy Mix Proctor-Silex hand mixer with five speeds. $11.99 plus tax.

I didn’t think about the purchase, I just stopped by the hardware store after I’d packed the car with groceries and carried the only electric-mixing product they had on display to the register.

It worked well enough, even though I had to apply a certain directional pressure I alone understood, to keep the top speed humming. And it continued to work well enough for the next thirty years as other machines started taking up residence, such as a stand mixer; an immersion blender; and even a classic, low-tech, potato mashing tool, which also came to live in our kitchen.

Though … I must admit, the allure of seasonal displays of perfect pyramids of kitchen gadgets over the years had tempted me to replace the working-well-enough mixer with one that might work more perfectly than well enough.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a pretty mixer that came with a storage compartment? One that would work at all speeds without hesitation? One that I had thought about for more than a moment and that would fulfill some understanding I have about my life?

YES! I admitted. “Yes! Thirty years is a good long time,” I reasoned. “It may even be wise to replace such an elderly appliance. Who knows how much moldering cake batter is kerning around inside the works.”

So I marched into the hardware store and bought the prettiest, most elegantly designed mixer they had – a six-speed beauty with a snap-on case. $37.99 plus tax.   

And when I got it home and fired it up … it worked well enough.

 

Training day

“You want to go to the gym?”

If you are like me … you probably don’t.

You’d rather curl up in your favorite chair with a cup of coffee and a sleeve of crumbly cookies and scroll through Netflix for something that will take your mind off the world for roughly 45 to 120 minutes.

On the other hand, also like me, you might be painfully aware that the question is coming from a gangly teenager who is only two months (and a few days) shy of being eligible to drive himself.

After that … It is a mere 18 months until he’s packing up for college.

And then he won’t be asking me to do much of anything.

It is all part of the unspoken contract we have with ourselves as parents to soak it all in before it’s all over.

Time is of the essence.

So I change into clothes that might facilitate a four-way “stretch,” and start the search for my keys.

He raises his hand and swipes the air. Around his finger hangs the electronic fob. 

“Ahem.”

He might have stood there forever, silently dangling the non-jangling device, before I would have noticed my hunt would be for naught.

“I’ll drive.”

His voice, as he says this, is imbued with more snark than excitement. The last time we made this trip I had insisted on driving and, well, let’s just say I made one navigational error that would live on in infamy in the novice driver’s mind. He is careful in his gloating. Knowing full well he still has to play to the audience, who is at this moment feeling a bit chagrined.  

“Of course. You could always use more practice driving at night.”

We don’t speak much on the commute. Instead, we listen to the soundtrack he has carefully programmed so that it won’t require him to take his eyes off the road even for a second. It sounds like the fast-beat celebratory music that plays at the end of just about every 80s-era arcade game. I don’t understand how he does it, but the fast-paced beats seem to keep him calm and focused. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

And it makes me realize he’s not such a novice anymore.

Because in trying to block out the visions of Froggers falling off logs or getting splattered on roadways, I focus on his driving. The starts and stops. The consistency of speeds. Smooth and unlabored. He’s come a long way. Gone are the days we inched toward the end of the driveway … it seems five inches per minute.

Tonight, in a moonless sky, we will practice using high beams. 

He is good at it. Turning them down the moment a car approaches but before it comes into view. 

Before long we arrived at our destination. We park and head into the gym, I assume, to our separate corners. He will go to the free weights, and I will go to the circuits.  

Do you want me to show you how to use the squat stand?

I resist the urge to laugh at the oxymoron in that sentence, and just follow along.

Time is of the essence, especially in the world of personal training.

Safety Third

I read with interest linguist John McWhorter's essay on the loss of the freer-ranging childhood of his youth (NYT Opinion Nov. 2).

In it he explores the more than five-decade history of childhood between the 1970s and now, wherein our nation's kids increasingly found their movements tethered and under the near-constant observation of adults. 

He surveys the time after chattel enslavement and the industrial age, skipping past civil rights and Jim Crow. He lands in the early 80s where the numbers of kids seen and heard in the wild seem to precipitously decline. 

We went from teens and tweens on every corner, to witnessing virtually no unaccompanied minors anywhere. 

He uses studious theories to foment the rational argument that our kids are experiencing a decline in mental health like no other generation because they have no opportunities to navigate our communities alone. 

He cites thinkers who believe it's the eyes upon them that keep our kids from becoming the stable, reliable adults we think we became. 

As a member of GenX, and someone who experienced the barely restricted freedom to pedal off into the world alone and unhelmeted - I identify with McWhorter's sense of grief.

I, too, believed my childhood was marked by a sheen of magic that has dulled for my children. 

I say this despite the dangers I know my parents worried about at the time: dog bites, cars colliding with bikes, even the unspeakable attentions of men no one in polite society would have suspected.

But McWhorter, like most of us, focused on 1981 as the flashpoint. 

In my mind and probably the minds of many, the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh at the hands of a stranger is what shattered our idyllic veneer. 

It changed the way society viewed the ways we could and should protect our children.

“Stranger” became synonymous with danger. And a new crime entered our unshakable belief system: parents who would leave their children alone or let them go anywhere unsupervised for even short lengths of time could be charged with neglect. Even if nothing foul befell their kids.

McWhorter makes good points as he implores our fearful leaders to support new laws that won’t criminalize parents for allowing their children to “range” more freely.

He's not wrong.  

In his essay, McWhorter reminds us that on the whole, the dangers we envisioned haven't materialized. Violent crime is down, and children are as safe as they ever were during those magical days of our youth. 

If they happened before the 1990s.

Of course, we now have cars that drivers need cameras to see out of; and a Supreme Court that will let states take away voting rights and health care choices, but they will let just about anyone have a gun. 

Because of that, our schools have armed guards and active shooter drills because some of our leaders would rather have a right to a private arsenal than a public education. 

We may think that safety is our FIRST priority, but the reality is that safety figures much, much lower on the list. 

We should be reminding ourselves as well as our leaders that our desire to make our kids safer has driven innovation: it gave us bicycle helmets; backup cameras, hearing protective earbuds, and protected bike paths.

We should be reassuring ourselves, too, that most of our children will grow up and become loving and protective members of society. And they will likely have fond memories of their childhoods they wish their children could share.