What The Children Know (June 3, 2020 Column)
I can revisit my childhood anytime I wish, dropping in at a moment's notice, connecting with my earliest memories on a whim. I lived on Google Street, just two clicks from you.
That's where I find the past, anyway. I hop onboard the search engine and wander online maps in search of familiar roads, always reminded that it wasn't the way I remember.
I return to the first house I have any memory of, although it's long gone. I can always find the street on maps, though, as there are still familiar landmarks. And then there's my school.
It's no longer an elementary school, and for all I know it was rebuilt from the foundation up, but it looks awfully familiar, new paint but old architecture. My first four years of school were spent at Will Rogers Elementary, and I have the pictures to prove it.
We lived half a block away, although our side of the street appears to be all industrial now, storage units and manufacturing. The map stirs my memory, though, as I rotate around 360 degrees, trying to imagine the perspective of someone four feet tall.
I'd walk back and forth to school, sometimes alone, and on weekends I always heard the buzzing of radio-controlled planes, flown around the large playground by hobbyists. It's a singular sound from my childhood, that buzz, second only to the siren.
It was located on the school property, or nearby, an air-raid siren that went off every Saturday at noon. Air raids were anachronisms in suburban America in the 1960s, a remnant of the World War II years on the West Coast; even as a child, even after the war movies on our small black-and-white TV, I knew better than to expect planes. When danger came from the sky, it would be much quicker than that.
I was terrified of that siren, and what it represented. I wasn't crazy about the intermittent interruptions of our regularly scheduled broadcasts, either. I passed my childhood in the era of Special Bulletins, and they were never good news.
I walked home from kindergarten in November 1963, arriving to find my mom agitated and no cartoons on TV. I don't think I knew what a president was, but I'm pretty sure I grasped bullets and death.
We lived near Los Angeles, not far from Watts, where riots exploded in the summer of 1965, and friends of our family spoke of cleaning guns and preparing for looters.
The Vietnam War was on TV, a daily feature. When I was 9, I listened to whispered phone conversations when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and two months later we discussed the murder of Robert Kennedy in my fourth-grade classroom.
And it was really a happy, peaceful childhood, far softer and gentler than the times faced by my parents' generation. I can't complain; it's just that things were happening, and children will listen.
They always do.
I've had a lot of discussions with my 6-year-old grandson lately. We don't talk about the news, although since he spent the last couple of months of kindergarten staring at a laptop, he's more than aware.
He was also diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was a toddler, and he's never known life without insulin and food that has to be weighed and measured. He understands the pandemic.
But we mostly read books together. He crawls into the tent my wife and I sent him for Christmas last year, a bedroom redoubt, and waves his mother out of the room as we read about Bilbo Baggins. We take turns and flip the pages together, iPads in sync from 1800 miles away.
It's not ideal. It's 1800 miles from ideal, but it's the best we can do at the moment, and we manage fine. He laughs at my COVID grooming, my shaggy hair and bushy beard, and I stare at the screen and try to read his eyes.
He's been having long conversations with his parents. Hours and hours, on the back deck, in the living room, under his tent. He's bright and curious, and his mom and dad have always been engaged with the world. And children will listen, as I said.
They're not talking about the virus. They're talking about race.
He's 6 years old. He's smart and sweet and kind, and I'm his grandfather so don't listen to me, but this kid has charmed every person he's ever met. He listens carefully and thinks deeply, and his mom says he wept the other day, saying he'd never call the police, even if someone was stealing his Nintendo. Children will listen.
And he's had somber conversations with his parents about perhaps someday having to place his beautiful, blond, very white body in front of one of his black or brown friends to protect them. He is six years old, and children will listen.
So now I wonder what he'll remember, although I'm pretty certain it'll be everything. The masks, the months. The riots, the fires. The insecurity, the fear.
I want to be optimistic for him. I want to tell him to watch for the helpers, no matter what uniform they wear. I want him to love, and admire, and respect. I want him to hope.
But I'm a 61-year-old man, and when I hear a siren I get nauseated, and have to resist looking up at the sky, wanting it to stop. Understanding that I have to listen, now.
