Who's at risk?

We were out to enjoy the autumn leaves on the last nice day before the weatherman told us rain and high winds would strip the trees. The sky was blue and the air was crisp as we drove along the edge of town toward the park by the river.

“Down this way—” My mother-in-law pointed to a short street that ended abruptly on a bluff overlooking the park. “—there’s a cul-de-sac where kids come to take drugs. Our friends often find stoned teens asleep in their front yard.”

I was shocked. Here? In the small Minnesota town where my husband grew up? The town where we lived when our girls were in junior high that one of our Indiana friends described as “living in a Norman Rockwell painting”? It didn’t seem real. I’m not naïve enough to think there is no crime in small towns even though when Mom sold the house Steve grew up in, she hadn’t locked the door in so long that she couldn’t find the keys. Unfortunately, crime is everywhere. But I grieved for the despair of teens that would get sucked into such as destructive life.

We parked our car near the low bridge (as opposed to the high bridge that the highway uses to cross the river.) Two small children played on the climbing frame under the watchful eye of a man who might have been their grandfather. I thought of the delight of my own nearly-two grand daughter who is getting more articulate by the day. “Playground” is now part of her vocabulary, and she shouts it enthusiastically whenever she sees one.

Mom and I walked down an asphalt path across the lawn and followed on into the woods where it turned to dirt and scattered leaves. But I couldn’t get those stoned kids out of my mind. Was this a pleasant walk along the river bank far from the noises and smells of traffic and the garish lights of strip malls? Or was it an isolated spot to take drugs or have sex with no one around to say ‘no’?

The young people our friends find asleep in their yard were once as small and vulnerable as Bella. They came to the park to climb on the playground, throw a ball or shuffle through the leaves to Grandpa. Then somewhere along the line, despair took hold.

African children aren’t the only ones at risk.

Baby Laughter

When I was a child, I loved Peter Pan. The Mary Martin version shown on television was an annual ritual, but its influence lasted throughout the year. I was the strongest and always chose to be Peter. The eldest of the family down the street was Wendy, and we forced our little sisters to play Captain Hook and Tiger Lily. I was plenty old enough to not believe in fairies, but I still lay in bed staring at the window, willing it to be flung open and Peter to fly into my room to take me off for adventures in Never Land. (It was very irritating that the window slid sideways instead of opening outwards to the stars and my bedroom was partly below ground, screened by bushes in a split-level. How pedestrian!)

 
In James Barrie’s play Peter tells us that when the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and that was the beginning of fairies. Now that I am ever-so-much more than twenty, that theory is still easy to believe when I hear my granddaughter, Bella, laugh. She hasn’t learned to smile politely at appropriate times. There is never malice in her laughter. No one is ever the brunt of her joke. The giggles and chortles and squeals of delight that spill out of her represent nothing but sheer joy.

 
I hear it when a tower of cardboard blocks tumbles down. I hear it when Mommy turns her upside-down to kiss her tummy. I hear it when she can hardly hold still long enough to get her clothes off and come into the hot tub with us or when her pink snowsuit appears and she knows she is going for an outing.

And whenever I hear it, I think of fairies.