Childhood Memories

This week I was reading Hanna Rosin's The Atlantic article "The Over-Protected Kid." As I contemplated the article I remembered my childhood where I was not over protected. My mother set rules and boundaries, which I often ignored, but then she pretty much left me on my own from the time I was about six years old, or likely even before.

League City, Texas

I remember when I was in first and second grade and we lived in League City, Texas, right across the highway from Galveston County Park, I recall two rules - don't cross the highway and don't go past the railroad tracks. I was pretty good at not crossing the highway and the railroad tracks were a good natural boundary. But, I roamed far and wide with my buddy Byron Marshall with plenty of freedom. (Our street was named for Byron and his sisters Crystal and Velvet had their streets too.) I do remember once when I must have been hanging too close to the house and going in and out, my mother told me to stop banging the screen door. She finally locked it, keeping me out. Byron and I used to climb a row of pecan trees about a block away from the house, hunt for horned toads, walk through the fields watching the swallowtails fly, lose my shoes in what I referred to as quicksand. We had plenty of unsupervised adventures. Looking at the map of our neighborhood today, I see that the boundaries set were not too wide but for a six or seven year old they seemed large.

We moved to New York I strolled the streets around our apartment in New York City and then later in Yorktown Heights I remember roaming through the woods surrounding our house. There were streams and an abandoned quarry and small graveyards dating to the 1700s, and many other things to explore. My limit in one direction was the Taconic Parkway, not because my mother set a limit, but because i did not want to venture past it. I was an explorer but I had my limits. In the winter I would seek out the best places to sled. In the summer I played with trucks and plastic army men in the dirt, road my bicycle all over the place, and explored the woods, fished in the Quarry, and traded comic books, Friends I remember - Peter Smallman, Mike Hendel, Peter Torpey, and my next door neighbor Bruce Jenner (yes, the gold medal decathlon and Kardashian Bruce Jenner.)