Watching Too Closely

Watching too closely 

In the early 1980's, Beth Gutcheon published the only novel I've ever read that made me cry.  It was "Still Missing," the story of Alex Selky, a boy of nearly 7, who lived with this divorced mother, a professor at a New York University.  Alex walked to school one day and never returned.  His mother, looking more and more like a lunatic as the book progressed, hounded the detective on the case, begged people to put up posters, and did just about anything you were I would have done if our children had been missing.  I cried because at the end of the book, because of a stray lead and the input of a questionably credible psychic, Alex is located by the intrepid detective who bring Alex home to his mother amid a convoy of police cruisers.  I left tear drops on the last pages of my library's copy of my book.  


The crying wasn't over.  In 1982, Kate Nelligan and Judd Hirsh played mother and detective to life in a move closely mirroring the book,although titled "Still Missing."  Nelligan's angry and determined mother and Hirsh's frustrated but sympathetic detective (He's a father himself of a boy the same age), play off each other beautifully It is Hirsh who finds the missing boy and brings him home, accompanied by and passing an array of police cars driven by dedicated men who all want to be part of something happy for a change.  I have seen this movie at least a dozen times, and I cry shamelessly each time. 


Thirty-three years ago today, Etan Patz, the model for Gutcheon's novel is not coming home.  He will never come home.  Thirty-three years ago, it is reported that he was lured with candy into a convenience store where he was brutally murdered and his body dumped.  Apparently, recent cold-case efforts to find Patz's remains led to some retrieved "memories" about a man who admitted to killing a child in 1979.  Where this case goes from here, time will tell, and while we are all considered innocent until proven guilty, it appears that this case will soon be stamped "closed."  


The disappearance of Etan Patz rocked the world of parents and changed the world of children forever.  My children were both pre-school aged when Etan Patz was abducted.  We lived in a suburban area where all the children on the street played together and no one worried about the children being outside alone.  "Come home when the streets lights come on" was still the rallying cry of moms in the neighborhood.  Most of the children had two-parent families; mothers were often home, and if your child wasn't in the yard, s/he was a house of two down the street.  I was lucky in that my in-laws lived in the third house down, and so often my kids were over there eating grilled cheese sandwiches and watching TV with Grandpa.  


But over the years, as people became more aware of children missing, abducted, molested, and otherwise harmed, the freedom of children was squashed as the efforts to keep children safe were expanded, almost to a point of idiocy.  Parent started watching their children closely, driving them everyone and picking them up.  Children were no longer able to bicycle to the park or run around with their friends.  Obesity levels in children are not solely because of fast food.  We don't let kids walk or bicycle, or roller skate, skateboard anywhere.  Parents who don't glue themselves to their children are considered neglectful.  I can only imagine how often Child and Family Service people would have knocked on my door or my mother's door when I was young after finding my daughter (or me at the age of 8, 9, or 10) over a half mile from home.  


I'm reading more and more stories of children who have to be picked up from school, walked by a parent, or take the bus because the child lives three houses away from school.  It's ridiculous  We need to teach children how to be safe, not create a world where they are sheltered from one evil but exposed to another.  We keep them under our roofs on sunny days when they should be playing outside, and while we're not looking over their shoulders, they are playing violent video games, or being preyed upon on the internet.  We've only traded one ill for another one, while still providing few tools these children can use as they grow older.  


Etan Patz is never coming home escorted by blue lights, sirens and the joyful faces of law enforcement people.  Many other children are never coming home either.  I'm not foolish enough to think that no child will ever again be harmed.  When I was twelve, my school chum Cheryl Laird, was abducted, assaulted, and brutally murdered - her body having been dumped less than a mile from my house.  Violence is not new. I do think, however, we have pushed the pendulum too far in the other direction.  We need to teach children, not watchdog them.  I hope the parents of Etan Patz do not hold themselves responsible for letting him walk to the bus stop unescorted that day.  They did nothing wrong.