Where Have All the Children Gone
It’s summertime kids. The sun is out and the nights are long. School is something to be barely tolerated this late in the game, a thick restraining arm holding you back from all the budding potential of a hundred plus dog days. . .so where the hell are you?

My neighborhood is residential and families are breeding at an preternatural rate. Yesterday, while I dug out more room in the garden for expecting vegetables, I was serenaded by the cries and screams on no less then three infants who threw tantrums in close proximity to my own home. It seemed no amount of cooing or shooshing was going to keep these babies from teaching us all a thing or two. The babies made the dogs howl and the dogs made the birds go crazy. The ear-splitting orchestra was more than I could take and I was forced back indoors to enjoy some time with a silent corona and a speechless Esquire.

But now I’m off track. . .Yeah, there are a ton of babies in the hood, but we’ve also got the normal allotment of middle school and high school aged kids as well. I see them from time to time exiting the big Catholic Middle School just down the street. They saunter home carrying Voyageresque size ruck-sacks and quickly move into the comforts of their own home. And then – this is what kills me – they never come back out! The baseball diamonds at the park lay empty and overgrown, The basketball courts at the community center just two block away are as desolate and deserted as a January evening. I hear and see no skateboards rolling down the well trimmed sidewalks. Hell, the community center has these thirty foot gently declining stairway rails with no obstacles to impede someone from pulling off one hell of a rail-slide. The whole center enjoys easy banked and nice rounded 60’s architectural surfaces throughout. But ain’t no one shredding it up. There isn’t even the faintest sign of wax to indicate those who came before. Dirt bikes? BMX? Anybody out there? What up kids?!?

So I guess the question is, what gives? Have the pretend skateboarding video games, the IM’ing/internet, and just plain old dumb television rendered the outside world boring and forgettable. Are kids so loaded down with commitments and formalized activities that there’s just no room for unsupervised, unscripted fun? Has the fear got ’em? I don’t know the answer. I do hope, with the close of the school year, that the gentle hum of four Birdhouse Fat Guy 54mm wheels riding swiftly, racketing at every break in the concrete like a bulky metronome, will work to drown out the shrill speak from younger voices.