When you insist on dwelling in the central part of a big city — for whatever reason: you hate commutes, you style yourself as an urbanite, you fancy antique homes and neighborhoods — you get used to certain hazards of life. The bums. The burglars. The mail thieves. The car thieves. The nightly visits from cop helicopters. The boondoggles City Hall inflicts on you to “improve” your town by way of enriching the politicos’ sponsors. It’s all just Life in the Big City.
But sometimes “Life” goes beyond the pale.
Not far from the ’hood a few days ago, some guy jumped over the back wall of a yard where two little girls were playing, a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. He exposed himself to them and then grabbed the smaller child. (BTW, some of the facts are wrong in that linked story: the guy did not spend 40 minutes in the family’s yard but had been spotted in the area over a 40-minute period.)
When I read this in a local news report, I assumed he’d jumped over the alley wall — alleys being a natural hazard in an inner-city neighborhood. But this morning while the dogs and I were perambulating, one of the neighbors stopped to chat. He said the guy had jumped a neighbor’s wall and then jumped into the girls’ yard.
Obviously, he’d been watching the family, he knew where they lived, he’d plotted a way to get at the kids, and he knew when they were outdoors.
Think of that. You can’t even let your kids play outside inside their own walled yard without their mommy hovering over their shoulder every minute!
I will admit that I was abhorred by the self-righteous attacks on the couple who let their kids play in a neighborhood park all by their little selves. One of the reasons the ubiquitous digital invasion of personal privacy gives me the whim-whams is that when I was a little girl, I was allowed to go outside and PLAY, which is what little kids are supposed to do. When I got home from school, I jumped on my bike and was gone until dinnertime.
But when predators as bold as this one make themselves known, you have to figure the best thing to do is lock your kids inside and never let them see the direct sunlight. Guys like this jerk are riding up and down the alleys all the time — if you were outside watching, you’d see them every day. Cassie and Ruby go batshit every time they hear someone out there, and they hear someone out there with some frequency.
If those were my kids, the next morning they’d have a new 90-pound pet. They probably also would be looking at a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. No wonder people covet walled compounds governed by HOAs!
When my son was small, we lived in a quaint downtown neighborhood — a very pretty historic area. There were many, many more bums than we have here in the ’hood. You couldn’t stick your nose out the door without seeing a bum. The crime rate was much higher; the present ’hood has a surprisingly low crime rate, despite the neighboring blight. And no, my child did not play outside in front unless either I or the neighbor’s nanny was standing out there watching.
We had German shepherds, and that was why we had German shepherds.