Anonymous Mom: I Let My Young Children Play By Themselves On A Street In New Orleans
”Are these your children?”
The man’s speech was slurred. My husband Bruce had opened the front door, and our children and our dog skulked past the man at the door and into the living room. The children stood there, mute, between the stranger and Bruce while the dog eased past us, low to the ground. As I got closer, I smelled beer on his breath.
”I found them playing on the corner by the tree,” he said, ”and I thought they were too little to be on their own. I didn’t mean to scare them. I’m not a bad guy. I was just trying to protect them by bringing them home.” He was almost wider than he was tall, wearing shorts, a New Orleans Hornets tank top, and weatherbeaten flip-flops. He kept chuckling and smiling, as if expecting us to do the same. ”I live just around the corner on State Street.”
”Were they bothering you?” asked Bruce. ”Were they doing anything wrong?” He put a hand on each of their heads.
”Oh, no, it’s just your little girl especially, she’s so tiny. I thought something might happen to them. Someone might hurt them.” He made eye contact with me. Someone. I thought of checking the sex offenders map on the Internet. 1100 block of State Street. Then I felt guilty for not thanking him.
The children were six and four. Our son was the oldest child on the block, and he loved to be outside. We’d just begun letting the children play by the tree three doors down, and this was the fifth time someone had returned them like runaway poodles.
After taking our awkward leave from the stranger, Bruce and I looked at each other. I felt like a bad mother, but he was mad. ”Where does that guy get off?” he asked.
”That guy is a stranger,” I said, more to Bruce than to the children. ”And they just went with him.”
Bruce and I both grew up in the Garden District of New Orleans, a block apart. In the 1970’s, when we were the ages our children are now, our parents kicked us out of the house without a second thought. My mother would stand in our kitchen, telephone wedged between her cheek and collarbone, waving her cigarette in the direction of the front door.
It wasn’t a crime-free wonderland out there. Once when I was walking home from school, a slightly older boy brandished a pipe and took my watch. Some kids knocked my brother down for his Halloween candy, and later a man held a gun to his head while he was rounding up shopping carts for his summer job. We had nine break-ins during my childhood, and twice I was the latchkey kid to come home from school and discover our drawers ransacked, the window in my bedroom broken.
Bad things kept happening, but my parents didn’t limit our freedom. No doubt the era had something to do with it. Etan Patz and Adam Walsh weren’t kidnapped until I was eight and ten, respectively. After that, missing children’s pictures showed up on milk cartons, and parents started thinking it could happen to them. But not my parents. By that time, I was deemed too old for kidnapping.
My favorite thing to do on the weekends, once I was about eight, was to leave the house unannounced by the back door, climb up the garden wall, and walk along it like a balance beam to a neighbor’s house two doors down. I’ll call him John C. Rivers, III. John was a bachelor the same age as my mother, 36 He was from a wealthy shipping family, and even though my mother didn’t know him well, the family name was enough to earn her trust. John worked in the family business, but wrote poetry on the side. He had the first Atari on the block.
At one point, my mother let it drop that John was dating eight different women at the same time. When his house was robbed, my mother and I helped him clean up. The robber had used matches instead of turning on the lights, so burnt-up matches littered the whole place. The first thing that caught my eye when I entered his bedroom was a box of ”Fundies,” which the picture made clear were underwear built for two. The image on that box has never left me, the white of the ”Fundies” gleaming against the couple’s bronze thighs.
I used to arrive at his house Saturday and Sunday mornings around ten, wake him up, and cook him breakfast. He’d sit at his dining room table in his navy blue velour robe while I served him eggs and toast, an apron tied around my waist. Then I’d clean the kitchen.
John and I loved to play ”Name that Tune.” He would put on one of his Barry Manilow records, play the first few bars of a song, and I’d guess the title. ”I Write the Songs” was our favorite.
We also made up a secret code for the kazoo, and we used it like a telephone. I’d walk down the garden wall to his backyard and whip out the kazoo while still balancing on the wall. I’d hoot, and he’d respond. One long hoot meant, ”I have a girl over here.” Two short hoots meant, ”Come back in five minutes.” Three short hoots meant, ”Come on in.” We each had a copy of the code, handwritten on my notebook paper.
John comes off as a cross between Humbert Humbert and Peter Pan. At the time, he was just one of many benign adults I knew well.
Today, would I let my own daughter visit a bachelor who owned a pair of ”Fundies?” Would I let her wake him up and make him breakfast? Would I let them spend hours alone together?
No way.
John and I have stayed in touch. We had coffee one afternoon in 1995 when I was visiting home from graduate school. He asked how much money I made and what my rent was, then blanched when I told him. A half-hour after that meeting, he drove by my house and silently handed me an envelope out of his car window. Inside was 300 dollars in cash. Last month, I noticed a plaque on the wall of my children’s favorite room in the Audubon Insectarium, a ”cave” that simulates what it would be like to be the size of a bug: ”This exhibit made possible through a generous donation from John C. Rivers, III.”
Despite the potential for disaster, John was a strange adult well worth getting to know. Now, by closing the door on the drunken State Street stranger, I might have turned away my children’s John Rivers. That would be another kind of disaster.
(Image: getty Images)
