March 6, 2015

I grew up at 622 Meade St. in Saginaw, Michigan. To say it was a modest little home would be putting it mildly. Its two bedrooms came to burst with five people which led to a rather epic remodeling project one summer that added a third bedroom, even as it subtracted a formal dining room and put our eating space in the kitchen. But I am sure than no matter what the configuration, my parents were just glad to own a house at all, considering that both had come of age during The Great Depression, experiencing varying degrees of privation as a result. In any event the house on Meade St. was surely a step up from the shack on Green St. I had been born into, three rooms with a cellar that my mother would slam the door against the floor before heading into, lest she catch the rather nasty rat that dwelt down there unawares .

I don't tell these stories to demonstrate how rough my childhood was, though I freely admit that I do love to tell them with a certain rueful air of hand on back of neck, "Kid, you just don't know," and not just in the clichéd "I walked five miles to school uphill both ways" manner, but also from a place that says, "Can you believe it? They tore down my turn of the century elementary schoolhouse to replace it with something new and modern down the street, and they left the vacant lot full of bricks and debris open for us kids to play World War II army games in for months afterwards!" -- my incredulity fueled as much by the fact that I grew up that close on the shadow of The Last Good War as by the reality that the lawyers would never have allowed kids access to such a perfect play space today. In other words, I like to share these things, at least in part, because I can't believe that I'm this old. And yet, the sad truth is that I do tell these stories as a way of gesturing, because I can do no more than that really, toward the dangers of my childhood.

Little would the lawyers have known, if they had cared so much as they profess to do nowadays, that the danger lay not in decayed bricks and mortar. To really see what harms our young people is no easier now than it was then, yet at the same time, not so very much harder than "merely" listening as they tell us what happened in school that day, how they're getting along with their siblings, what is up with their best friend. It takes ears and eyes and heart. That these qualities may have been in short supply within those simply happy to keep roof over heads is understandable. That I cannot do an even slightly better job may well be intolerable.

"My number one job is to keep you safe," I have told my boys more than once as they have grown up in this incredibly luxurious home compared to the place where I was raised. And to be sure, these four floors of fun and the street on which they reside have done their share to keep them safe. At the same time, while I have never been the sort of parent who hovers over them from dawn till dusk, I think I have lived with a fearful certainty, perhaps born of experience, perhaps a product of our crazy-making societal terror, that something, somewhere, somehow would "get" my boys. That this has not happened yet may be a marker of my paucity of knowledge or a sign that we truly do lead the charmed lives I so readily portray in this diary. Whichever the case, if and when my boys fall down their rabbit holes, I can only pray for a pair of sure and steady hands to catch them.

My life is not their lives, I get that, really. At the same time I have no definitive proof that the conditions of childhood have changed so very much -- my boisterous dinner table aside -- from the years in which children were meant to be seen and not heard. With that in mind, that I cannot keep them safe forever may indeed be a given. But that I can tend their wounds better than mine were taken care of should be equally sure. If that is the best I can do, it is something.