I want to say no, that you’re too young, that I won’t be there if you need help. But you say you’re nine years old, and that Flora’s house is just around the corner. Yes, I think, it is just around the corner today, but next time it will be a few miles away, and soon enough it will be up to the city in a car driven by a lanky kid to a place that scares me because it is dangerous and full of things too mature for you. You plead with me, still whining your kid whine, but integrated with that more mature voice of your future.
It’s literally around the corner, you say. You stress ‘literally’ with the same exasperation I would. And I can’t argue your point. Flora’s house is literally around the corner, twelve or fourteen houses away. It is not a stretch of real estate where guns come out before reasonable discussion, or where cars devour the road with abandon. There are no sidewalks, which I don’t love, but there is a shoulder to step to if a car roars down the curves.
As I talk to you, I inadvertently push play on a series of my own memories supporting your request. There I was, grabbing twenty tendrils of Big League Chew, sitting and balancing with one leg on my BMX “Macho II” bike. No one was there to say only one more piece because there were no wrappers here, no built-in limits in easily quantifiable and bounded single-serve helpings, no helicopter parents watching. Big League Chew told me to set my own limits. And why not? I was ten now. I was in Ocean Pacific “OP” corduroy shorts and my Dick Allen’s Yamaha Honda shirt from the shop where my dad bought our three-wheeled all-terrain cycles (ATCs). Motorcycles and ATCs scared the hell out of me but I loved that shirt. Maybe because it represented some masculine future I thought I wanted. I wore it every day it was clean and even more when it was not.
Four of us were now racing to Granary Square. Granary Square was a playground for us. It was not a southern California mini mall with a convenience store, a few retail outlets, and a drug store. No, that is what Granary Square was to adult eyes. It was a place replicated across suburban America in numbing ubiquity, making towns in Iowa or Kansas or Nevada feel just like Santa Clarita, California. We didn’t see it that way. Granary Square was the embodiment of freedom backed up with a bedrock security we could count on. If one of us did an endo on our bikes, crashing over the handle bars onto the concrete, we knew our parents would be there. We had no phones, no pagers, only the map in our heads where our bikes fit—a maze of streets, paseos (walkways running between the cul-de-sacs of our 1970s planned community), dirt ruts through new construction, and alleys behind stores. How did our parents materialize when we couldn’t fix a sprained ankle or a head-to-concrete collision? Logic tells me we hustled to the nearest friend’s house and called the home phone of the injured kid, but I don’t remember.
The movie in my head cuts to playing shopping cart tag in Miller’s Outpost, one of the anchor stores at Granary Square. The door opened to the smell of new, red- and black-gridded flannel and stiff denim before the world recognized how much more the public liked pre-softened jeans. It feels now like our game lasted hours, but I have to believe it was two or three minutes until a clerk shut us down, screaming admonishment and banning us from the store. We were at the age where one kid in the cart was still light enough for the pilot to push at top speed through paths formed between circular racks of country western outfits. We weaved and cut, balancing on two wheels when the pilot grappled with the beast moving too quickly to make a sharp pivot. Sometimes we speared a circular rack head on, burying the passenger in drapes of hanging button-up tops.
The drug store or 7-11 was another stop so we could buy our bubble gum in beautiful pink ropes, Slurpees or Cokes, and candy: Milk Duds, Nerds, Skittles, or Snickers. Sugar to the degree we wanted it, limited only by the cash in our pockets, was another route to a freedom. Our summers were 100-degree days, backyard swims, and southern California track housing in stucco with Navajo white on trims, every fourth house identical as per the master plan.
Then we were at “the wash,” a cemented-over, channelized river. We were there to find sticks to replicate the light saber sounds from Star Wars, rumored to have originated by vibrating the plastic sheaths on power pole stanchions we were supposed to leave alone (and not even have access to, except that we knew the chain on the gate had enough slack that we could all shimmy through). We banged and grated the faded yellow covers with sticks, rocks, and old bottles. We got a few interesting sounds, but none like the Jedi sabers from the movie.
But here we are now, you and I, in a different neighborhood, four decades later, and you are still staring at me in the kitchen, waiting for my answer. I think about your mom’s confidence that you are ready. I consider my own concerns as I tear myself away from the alluring reel in my head.
Okay, I say. Okay. But ask Flora’s mom to text me when you get there. Your face glows at your impending solo walk to your friend’s house for the first time in your life. Your freckles stretch and flatten ear to ear. You hug me for five full seconds, leaning your head on my chest the way you did as a baby in your pink-striped, fuzzy onesie.
You rush downstairs and I see you appear at the end of our driveway. From our second-floor garden window, I watch you walk the two hundred yards to the corner. You bounce in your baggy Costa Rica hoodie and grey leggings and your reddish-brown hair bobs up and down with each step.
At the corner, I hope you will turn around and wave. But you don’t know I’m watching, so why would you? And I won’t usually be there in the future, will I? This first time though, I want that wave. I need that subtle recognition of the work we’ve put in to get to this milestone.
You pause at the corner. Here it comes, I think. Yes. You look left, up the street, then down toward your friend’s house. I come up on my toes a smidge, waiting for your smile back toward our house with the love that will make me whole. I watch as you turn, and four steps later you are past the overhanging trees and into the heavy mist of the drizzly day, on your way.
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