Foggy Memory #47

I was listening to that song by Train this morning on the radio, and I heard a line I hadn’t paid attention to before. “When children have to play inside, so they don’t disappear...” It reminded me of something from my childhood. In the late 70’s and early 80’s there was a rash of child abductions in the area where I grew up. It was all over the news, and every kid in public school was getting the full dose of ‘don’t talk to strangers’. I can remember thinking how dumb these kids gotta be? Some weirdo offers you a ride home from school and you take it? My seven year old brain had it all figured out, until one day when a strange thing happened.

We lived out in the country. At that time I think we were technically only a mile outside of the city limits, but the city (if you could call it that) didn’t actually start for another mile and a half beyond that. So, out in the middle of farmland we didn’t get too many passers-by. I remember one day this big white car drove up in front of our house. The guy in the passenger’s side rolled down his window and asked me if I knew how to get to Kmart. Now, I’ve always been good with knowing directions, and I did know how to get to Kmart, but at this time in my life I didn’t even know the name of the street in front of my house, let alone the three roads you needed after that. But I did my best. “You take this road a mile, turn left at a stop sign. Go another mile to another stop sign, then turn right and you’ll see it when you get to a stop light.”

I was pretty impressed with myself, but that soon changed as the guy in the car said he couldn’t hear me. Then he opened his car door and set one foot on the ground. I remember thinking ‘you don’t need to get out of your car mister; I can walk up there’. And before I had a chance to take a single step, the door slammed shut, and the car sped off; in the wrong direction, of course.

My sadness at failing to be helpful faded quickly, as my older brother (by 7 years) started giving me the what-for. “How dumb are you? Those guys could’ve picked you up and been long gone before any of us knew you were gone. Don’t talk to people you don’t know.” It was a startling revelation. I had quite possibly been duped. I mean really, how could anybody have not known how to get to Kmart?

Every time a Star Trek episode talks about alternate realities, I wonder if there’s one where my brother didn’t walk around the corner of the house and scare those guys off. I feel a little guilty sometimes for my blind luck, and I try to convince myself that in another reality those other kids didn’t get picked up either.