My neighborhood is full of little crotch fruit their parents apparently don't care enough to watch. The little lawn goblins run amok around a couple of street blocks with other neighborhood kids of various ages. When the older kids are out, most of the time they keep the younger ones from killing themselves and each other. When they're not, however, you have to drive about ten miles an hour because the little heathens will come darting out from the woods beside the collection of houses like the Children of the Corn. They run right out in front of your car and then stand looking at you like you should have been watching for them. How dare you be driving down this public street! A pair of the boys, who can't be more than ten, like to ride their bikes out and see how fast they have to go to get in front of the car before the cars hit them. In the middle of the street and not at the stop signs. They like to throw rocks at cars. They try to see if they can get them in through my open windows as I drive by. So far they've been unsuccessful and only managed to chip the paint on my already pock-marked hood. That earned me stopping and yelling at them to stop doing that before they hit someone in the head with a rock and hurt them. I didn't go into property damage.
Now they've stopped throwing rocks and are instead throwing mulch. I guess they figure that's softer somehow. At least it's softer than a baseball.
The kids throw balls across the street, right in front of the car as it's driving through. They run after it into the street as they're playing. I can't tell you how many times I've scared the hell out of myself when a football bounced off my hood and I thought I'd accidentally hit one of them. Some of the littlest ones are barely three or four and they could easily dart out in front of my car and I wouldn't see them until I'd run over them.
At least most of the time they don't form an unmoving horde of kids in the middle of the street and stand talking while I'm trying to drive through. Most of the time. They've done this two or three times before.
One summer, their parents set up bike ramps for them to use so they could teach themselves to use trick bikes. This would be an awesome idea if they would have done it in the driveway or even along the driveway between their house and the next door neighbor's house. Instead, they set them up in the middle of the street. They ride and flip their bikes, dump themselves across the pavement and pick themselves up to do it again. Then they leave the ramps out in the street where we have to swerve to miss them as we're coming home from work at ten o'clock at night when it's dark. My car doesn't really like going over the double one. Neither did the ramp. I think the car was too heavy for it. I saw it in the trash pile the next morning. At least the ramps were kept picked up out of the street from then on. I don't think I was the first to run over one, but I apparently was the last. You'd think these kids would learn to stop playing in the street. When my dad told me to go play in traffic when I was little, he didn't really mean it. I wonder if these kids, like me, took their parents literally. It would explain a lot of their behavior.
Anyway-- Happy mother's day to anyone who has children rather they be your own born children, your raised children, your fur-kids or your nieces and nephews. Happy mother's day to the fathers who play both roles or, like my son's father, plays the role of mother better than his biological mother.
Call a mom, rather it be yours or someone else's and tell them thanks for not killing us when we were children and not freaking out too badly when we almost managed to do it ourselves.
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