Minding The Children

I read Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi's reminiscence about losing track of her children in response to the killing of the gorilla in the zoo, and it made me think of my own such experiences.  Years ago with my two sons in New York City, walking along 42nd Street, we somehow got separated as they went in a store and walked out a different door while my sister and I stood outside chatting and waiting for them.  Well, I will spare you the details of the next anguished half hour, ending up with the police being summoned, and just as they prepared to take me to the station since the boys seemed truly lost, I saw them from my back seat in the  squad car walking along, hand in hand.  They were maybe four and five, and had walked on from the other door assuming we were ahead of them.  They crossed Fifth Avenue, then went to the New York Public Library and sat on a high wall to get the big view, according to their account of the event.  They then decided to retrace their steps and so it was came along just as I was about to leave.  My heart pounds when I remember this.  My sister had gone back to where we were staying in case they somehow turned up there.  I took them down to the subway and we rode uptown.  As we went along, I remarked to the younger what sang froid they seemed to possess to which he replied "We knew everything would come out alright.  It always does on television."  Where we lived in Brookline Massachusetts my children hung out with an ever changing crowd of seventeen or so children of all ages from the neighborhood who left their homes and joined their friends the minute they got home from school and threw their school bags down on the kitchen table.  We never saw them again until dinner time.  We learned later that the gang or parts of it at various times had gone on the subway system to explore all over the city.  When we lived in Rome my youngest child who was then six went home with a school chum on Friday night on a different school bus to a village down by the ocean, and on Saturday or Sunday took a city bus up the Stazioni Termini, the central train station, and transferred to the bus which would bring her to a stop near out apartment.  I never thought to worry about her even when once she made a mistake and ended up across the Tiber on top of a hill where stood the Hilton.  Meanwhile my boys, it turns out, who were in their early teens at this point confessed to me years later that they snuck out at night, climbed the villa walls, and went to a jazz club not too far distant. And then there was the time that my other daughter at this point a college freshman in Athens, Greece, went for a long weekend to visit her boyfriend's mother who lived in Madrid, and since he had already booked his flight got her something different.  In the ways of the young he did not notice that her flight brought her to an evening arrival and morning departure from Bucharest, then in deepest Iron Curtain territory just as it was beginning to liberalize.  He rushed frantically to tell me this upon his own arrival, and was aghast and disgusted when I said ever so calmly which indeed reflected my true feelings:  "Well, then I guess we'll see her about ten tomorrow morning."  I was sorry that she would have this anguish, but I did not think that the entire passenger list of this flight would be hustled off to the gulag.