The Village

There's been a couple of things that have come up recently that have caused me to remember that perhaps my youth wasn't quite the same as many people. Not in a bad way -- and not really even in an overly interesting way --but maybe just a touch different. Of course, a lot of that probably just had to do with the fact that I might have been just a little bit odd...or maybe the right word is geeky. Or, at least geekier than the son of a bookie is probably supposed to be.

During the course of a conversation with Amy, it came up that when I was a teenager, I subscribed to Ellery Queen Magazine...which publishes detective/mystery short stories. Had I been a teenager in the 1940's through the middle of the 1960's, there probably wouldn't have been anything unusual about this. However, this was in the mid-80's and let's just say that it wasn't what most of my peers were doing. Of course, one of my best friends -- Marty and Casey's godmother -- was getting Architectural Digest at the time. Then again, we both did fun things like went to academic summer camps and bandied about ideas for future novels. We met similar contemporaries in college, but we were living in the middle of nowhere at the time that all of this started. Back then, I used to frequently read three newspapers a day and would specifically take a route that would allow me to stop at the appropriate stores to get them since they weren't all available in one place.

Of course, Amy, the one that raised an eyebrow at my magazine subscription, used to read her local newspaper, pointing out every grammatical error along the way.

The other part about my younger days is that I'm actually a pretty good example of the "it takes a village to raise a child" thing. I'm at least enough of an example that you would think that Hillary Clinton would want to meet me, instead of slapping me with a restraining order.

When Amy was filling out a form for the kids' upcoming visit to the eye doctor and had to ask me when I first started wearing eye glasses. In actually, I started wearing glasses because my friend's mother made me. Marie, the AD reading friend from above, is about six months younger than me so initially I was a frequent chauffeur for her. She mentioned to her mother that I was having trouble reading street signs. Her mother -- who along with many of my other friend's mothers -- was one of the main reasons that I ate a regular dinner in high school. She was also a little overprotective of her daughter. Let's just say that I am still fairly well versed in what the proper procedures are in emergency situations because of her. She never made me take a CPR class, but that's only because she didn't think of it.

At the point that it was known that I was having trouble seeing, it immediately became an unacceptable situation. Marie's mother made the eye doctor appointment for me and then came to school to pick me to ensure that I went to it.

Having read plenty of Sports Illustrated stories, I know that this kind of thing isn't unusual. However, as I hinted at, her mother was only one of a group of people that would've done that for me. When I was younger, there was always at least one family of a friend that would keep tabs on me and try to make sure that I was staying on a straight path. I still remember in junior high when my English teacher told me with a touch of surprise that he had been someplace and when it came up where he taught at, one of my friend's mothers had started quizzing him on me.

When I was in high school, in a completely different part of the country, that number wasn't just one or two...it was at least five families. I ate dinner so often at friend's houses so often that usually the people that lived there stopped even noticing if I was there. Everyone made sure that I was taken care of. I was told by others that weren't part of those families that they were fiercely protective of me out in the small community in which we lived. By the time that my mother officially moved back to the East Coast and I moved in with the family that Marty and Casey consider their family, most people thought that I already did live there. Here's the thing though, when it became known that my mother had told me that she was not returning from her "visit" the group of families that watched over me all let me know that I was not in danger of having nowhere to go.

So, while there are undoubtedly things from my childhood that were not ideal -- I come from a crazy Irish family and that kind of goes with the territory -- there were other ways where my youth was unique in a positive way. I learned firsthand that there are good people in the world that will go out of their way to help someone. I don't know that you can underestimate how important a lesson that is to learn when you're a kid.

Knowing that people care about you no matter what when you're a kid gives you the freedom to be yourself...even if that just gives you the opportunity to be a geek.