A couple weeks ago, when I read about that 8-year-old Ohio boy who slipped out of the house while his parents slept, and then drove a mile and a half to McDonald’s with his 4-year-old sister in the car, I reacted as any typical American would:
I said, “Mm-m-m, a Big Mac would taste great right about now!”
You have to give the kid credit for learning how to drive by watching YouTube instead of hounding his parents for driving lessons. And for bringing his little sister along on the trip. And for taking his piggy bank along to pay for their meal. And for following all traffic laws — well, except for the driver’s license part. He sounds like a good kid. Besides, it was only 8 p.m., so he wasn’t even violating his bedtime.
Still, as a grandparent of three kids right around that age, I guess I should feel obligated to assign blame somewhere, or risk seeming to approve of a bad example with my silence. After all, that boy and his little sister rambled around the house with both parents sound asleep at 8 p.m. — Dad after returning home from a long day’s work, and Mom sacked out on the couch in front of the TV. So it’s obvious where the blame belongs, isn’t it?
I blame network TV programming. A hopped-up crack addict couldn’t say awake through that crap.
Over the next few days and weeks, I watched the news for the inevitable shame-blame spasm to be heaped on the parents, because Americans love assigning blame more than they love eating Big Macs. Which they love to blame for their obesity.
But the spasm never came. In fact, it was eerily silent out there.
And I was glad of the silence, because…well, I guess it’s time to confess at last.
It was late one snowy winter night in Schaumburg, sometime around 1974 when the phone jangled me awake. I picked it up and croaked, “Hello?” and heard a voice say, “Hey, do you know where your daughter is?”
I glanced at the clock and saw it was just a few hours past midnight. Our daughter was only four years old, so I said, “Yeah, she’s in bed. Who is this?”
It was our neighbor who lived directly behind us, and he said, “You might want to check your patio.”
I dropped the phone and dashed past Jenny’s room, where her bed sat empty. I rumbled down the stairs and saw that the back door stood slightly ajar, snowflakes whirling through the gap.
And there on the patio in her nightgown and rubber boots stood little Jenny, shoveling the snow from the bricks.
“I just wanted to surprise you,” she said as I hauled her back inside.
“Well, you did,” I said, and I shot off a salute of thanks to the lighted window in the house behind us. My neighbor flashed me a thumbs-up and turned out his light.
Fortunately, we lived in a tight neighborhood, so the episode never ended up on the nightly news. And our neighbors didn’t shame my wife and me when they found out about Jenny’s escapade because, knowing Jenny, they were just surprised she hadn’t grabbed a ladder and shoveled the roof.
My parents didn’t blame me either when they found out, because…well, we’ve come this far with our true confessions. Why stop now?
It was a spring Saturday in 1953 at my Dad’s company picnic at the forest preserve when I was five years old. The fried chicken and potato salad had been eaten, and the three-legged races and egg-toss wouldn’t begin for a while, so I wandered off to hunt frogs down by the pond at the bottom of the hill. But the frogs had taken the day off because it was chilly, though sunny, so I gave up the hunt and decided to climb into the back seat of our old Chevy where it was warm and toasty.
I snapped awake, surprised that I had fallen asleep, and when I hopped out of the car I noticed that all the scattered activity of the picnic had gathered itself around the banks of the little frog pond.
I ambled down there, where I saw that all the men were engaged in a new game: They all had their pants legs rolled up as high as they would reach, and they were wading side-by-side through the shallow, mucky pond.
“What’s going on?” I asked one lady standing in the crowd on the shore.
“They’re looking for a little boy who has gone missing,” she said without a glance at me. “They’ve looked everywhere else. This was the last place he was seen.”
“Really? What boy?” I asked.
“I don’t know his name,” she said. “He’s about five years old, wearing jeans and…a…striped…shirt….” She was staring at me now.
“Hey,” she called to the crowd. “Is this him?”
What followed was a smorgasbord of tight hugs to Mom’s chest, interspersed with angry shakes of her finger in my face. Relieved, the men laughed and waded back to shore, comparing their bony knees to each other’s.
I don’t think Mom and Dad went through any guilt-shaming about my picnic disappearance either, because plenty of people at that picnic knew me. They were just glad they had gotten through the potato salad without biting into a frog.
So I guess sometimes kids just wander off into some mischief, and you can’t always fault their parents, can you?
As I said, I have three grandkids at that “take-a-hike” stage, and I hope they all resist the urge to head out on their own for an adventure without their parents knowing about it.
But if they ever do, I hope they’ll remember to get a Big Mac for me, too.
