First full week of summer

Been a busy summer so far. I've done two webinars, which is exactly 2 more webinars than one should ever have to endure. It's like a seminar except without the human contact. In other words, nothing like a seminar. But it sounds cute, except it doesn't.

I'm also engaged in 2 long and deep correspondences with auto-replies. This is kind of fun. You can say whatever you want and you still get the same polite reply. It's kind of like shrieking at automated phone attendants, like Julie from Amtrak.

Had a few things go through my mind as well. First, I saw some little kids, maybe 3 or 4 years old, out playing on their lawn and giggling nonstop. There are also a few 8-10 year-old girls and slightly older boys who play on their lawns or ride in the streets around the neighborhood. Without a parent hovering over them. Yeah, actual playing.

It struck me how rare it is to see or hear about this kind of thing these days. When I was a kid, and in this case I mean ages 7-14, when I lived on a residential street in Brooklyn, you would get home from school and start knocking on doors to see who could come out to play. During the summer you would pretty much just wake up and do the same thing.

You knew who to ask and when. The Irish family across the street were churchgoers, so you never asked on Sunday until after lunch. The Orthodox kid could only play on Sundays and occasional summer weekdays. Most of the others were looser. Some of them would invite you in. Some were busy. But you could usually round up 4-8 kids to play some kind of game, which would be decided by the group. If there were only 2 or 3 of you there different things we could do.

And except for the occasion bit of participation by my friend's uncle Carmine, who loved to play touch football, there was never an adult to be seen. We knew we could go a block away to what we called the schoolyard, which was actually the faculty parking lot for Midwood High School, or stay somewhere on the block. And we'd keep it up until there was a critical mass of people called in for dinner.

Occasionally kids would come from a block away or from around the corner, but usually it was just the bunch of us on East 24th Street between Farragut and Glenwood Roads.

I'm not saying all this for nostalgia's sake. It's just nice to see even a glimmer of hope that the "keep the children safe" meme that's central to the ongoing Global War on Fun isn't the be all and end all. We live in the safest time to be alive in human history, in one of the safest countries. But we've all been bamboozled by stories of snatched children and the dangers of this and that and the like, which I guess happens sometimes here and there in a country of 350 million people, but which is HUGE news when it does happen. So parents are paranoid. It's just dumb and it's bad for kids.

There's more, but I'll pick up the rest in the next post.