One thing progress — advancement, the passage of time — is not doing a good job of is the right of children to wander about.
I have enjoyed shocking my children with the astounding tales of how, back in the day, the distant late 1970s and early 1980s, we were unloosed from our animal cages at the East Hampton Middle School every midday and permitted by the principal to wander up and down Newtown Lane unsupervised in search of lunch and adventure. No one wanted to stay in the overheated cafeteria, which smelled of tuna fish and rubber cement. We’d put down our strawberry-shaped erasers, flap shut our Trapper Keeper notebooks, and fling our fur-trimmed snorkel hoods over our heads to wear them like an army-green cape that flew out behind us (not slipping our arms into the sleeves). We swarmed like green bats as far as the Windmill Deli.
Dozens of kids would pack into Brothers Four Pizza for a slice (plain or “Sicilian”), burning the roofs of their mouths on the molten mozzarella. We’d linger in twos and threes in the aisles of Dreesen’s Excelsior Market, trying to decide between a Reggie chocolate bar, a pink-coconut marshmallow Snoball, and a cherry Slush Puppie, under the watchful eye of Mr. DeSanti in his white apron, who knew half of us delinquents (not me! not me! well, okay, maybe that once) were candy shoplifters.
Myself, I was partial to Eddie’s Luncheonette, to which I would stroll — always alone — to sit at the counter and order a Coke on ice and a hot dog, which was sliced open and grilled and then served on a buttered and grilled bun. The lunch of the gods. Seated at the counter beside me would be an assortment of working men in nylon windbreakers, smoking and making occasional joshing remarks to the cook-owner behind the counter, who delighted me once by looking at my face and saying, “You must be Ev Rattray’s girl.” My freckles and small, straight teeth betrayed my paternal lineage, and there was nothing cozier than being recognized by the cook as a member of what felt then like an eternal village community of shopkeepers, news reporters, butchers, and policemen. The village was as snug as Busy, Busy Town in a Richard Scarry picture book (in which colorfully dressed hippos carried grocery bags, red foxes drove tow trucks, and the worst mischief was a carpenter-pig swinging a stepladder recklessly on a crowded sidewalk).
I think the reason none of my friends went with me to Eddie’s for these favorite lunches when I was 11 or 12 was because it was a grown-up destination, smacking somehow of the early 1960s. Cadillac cars and crewcuts. It felt like the past in there — even then, when I would have been between 9 years old and 13. (This was when the middle school started at fifth grade, and I moved up from John Marshall when I was 9.) Can you imagine a 10 or 11-year-old today confidently walking alone into a luncheonette for a hot dog and Coke, paying with a pile of quarters pulled from the linty pocket of their snorkel coat? No, you cannot. Some surprised bystander would whip out their phone and film the scene for a cute TikTok real, and then the viral video would be followed by arrests for parental neglect.
Among the waystations on my juvenile perambulations — which were taken at minimum twice daily, to and from school, but usually more frequently as I needed to trudge back and forth in my fleshy-pink ballet tights the half-mile or so between my house and Gordon Peavy’s dance studio at Odd Fellows’ Hall — were James Marley Stationery (a wonder emporium of paper goods, cheap toys, and a candy counter, where I’d charge my Charms Blow Pop to the East Hampton Star account) and Whimseys. Whimseys sold grown-up things like calico aprons and coffee grinders, but also stuffed Eeyores and teddy bears with jointed limbs, and there were glass jars filled with penny candy and a stool by the cash register at which a young foot-commuter could sit and chew the ear off the rather inconvenienced saleswoman.
(I think her name may have been Sandy? And I apologize retroactively to Sandy, the Whimseys store clerk, for the many hours I spent occupying her stool and her time. I cannot imagine what I was talking about. How to sew satin-ribbon laces onto pink-leather ballet slippers? “The Six Million Dollar Man”? That time I volunteered during assembly to play the piano in front of the entire school, settled myself at the keyboard, and completely forgot the music?)
We knew no fear. I think what I am lamenting the loss of here is that we, the children of East Hampton — before, I don’t know, about 1990 — knew no fear.
Were we actually safer in the 1970s? No, we were not. There was quite a lot of crime, even in the village, in those days. Someone stole Bengt Hokanson’s bicycle from in front of Brothers Four. There was a serial rapist on the loose in Dunehampton. Adults were doing incredibly dumb stuff like having bad acid trips in the United Artists Cinema and taking off their T-shirts and bras in the lobby. They were shooting neighbors’ dogs with air guns. The 1970s were dangerous and they were strange. Every year some high school kid, a classmate of an older sibling, was killed in a fight or a car crash. But we didn’t live under a dome of fearfulness, somehow, nonetheless.
The dome of fearfulness is boring and I don’t actually think it’s helping keep the children safer.
Hardly anyone wanders the village on foot any longer. I know this for certain because, exhibit A, we all know that one perpetual perambulator (you know who I mean), who has become a local celebrity simply by insisting on always walking everywhere; and, exhibit B, I myself do walk to work these days and the only people I see on the sidewalk are distracted-looking Jitney passengers hurrying to the bus, with rolling suitcases bumping behind them, and women between the ages of 35 and 65 who carry large takeout cups of coffee, move in pairs, wear athletic pants, white running shoes, and long, black puffer-down coats, and are headed out-and-back to the Main Beach pavilion for the exercise. Oh, also, nannies pushing a baby or toddler in a fancy black stroller while they talk on their cellphones in accents from foreign lands.
When I first moved home from Canada and we were living on Accabonac Highway, I wanted my children to be brave and I wanted them to wander about freely as I had done. They were perhaps 5 and 7 when I pinned notes, with actual (not rhetorical) safety pins to the fronts of their T-shirts, providing our home address and my telephone number, and gently pushed them out the front door to walk around the corner hand-in-hand to the North Main I.G.A. for popsicles. They were stopped and questioned by a police officer before they got to the store.