I was four years old when I first wandered alone on the streets of downtown Milledgeville, Georgia, in the early sixties. My sister, Karen, was newborn and probably lying on a blanket on the front seat of my mother’s car, while I was standing up in the middle of the back seat, decked out in a black leotard and tights, with maybe an armrest between me and the windshield, because that was just the edgy sort of life we lived in those days. When we arrived at the ballet studio, my mother could not leave Karen in the car, so she dropped me off on the sidewalk in front of the staircase that led to the second-floor business. I climbed up to the landing at the top, only to read a note on the door that announced that the teacher had had a family emergency, and that class was canceled. I fled back down the stairs, but my mother was gone. Since cell phones only existed in science fiction novels at the time, I sat down on the bottom step and started to cry.
In my dim memory, it didn’t take long for a policeman to wander by, and he seemed surprised and somewhat amused to find a distressed preschooler in ballet slippers along his regular beat. He asked me a few questions, then smiled, took my hand, and led me to the nearby police station.
“I picked this one up for loitering,” he cracked as we entered a room filled with more busy people than I had ever seen. In reality, Milledgeville was a small, southern town, although it had the antebellum mansions to prove that it had once been the capital of the state. Be that as it may, the police station was a step up from Mayberry, but just a step. The secretaries had poufy, teased-up hairdos, and the police officers all seemed young and self-important. In their usual round of petty thefts and town drunks, I was the cutest thing that had ever happened to them. The women smiled at me, and one of the men offered me a stick of gum. They placed me in a wooden desk chair and encouraged me to twirl around and around. I was proud to be able to recite my parents’ whole names and my address and phone number. I was just getting bored when my fourteen-year-old brother, Allan, walked in. He explained that my mom was still in the car outside with an infant rolling around on the front seat. So we went home, and that was that.
Decades later, I look back on this experience and wonder how this scenario would have played out today, but I will not bore you with moralizations. We can look to true stories from the recent past to encourage us to imagine a sweeter, saner future. It could have all turned out differently, but—as Jane Austen would say—it didn’t.
The Reader Writes 