Early this morning, a strangeness overcame me when I awakened briefly. I remembered a childhood occurence as clearly as it had happened yesterday. The memory came from a time when I was 6 years old and we lived in a relatively quiet neighborhood. It was a time when you could allow your children to roam the neighborhood unsupervised … I had the reign of 10 neighborhood blocks. Of course at 6 it seemed like a huge area, something now I would look at as relatively small.

I had many friends, Mike and I were neighbors … best of friends … we would meet together and along with some other friends and play all sorts of childhood games. On the particular day in question, among the 5 or 6 of us gathered on the sidewalk, we began discussions of where we would play “hide and go seek”. I didn’t want to play at my house, because at my house there were just no good places to hide because I knew them all, and at age 6, you presume everyone else must know them too! We each had a vote and I voted to play at Mike’s house, after all, he had a big dog we just loved to play with.

Being there were several other kids there, obviously there was a differing of opinions. The concensus was that we should play at Jimmy’s house. At the time, I was not really happy about that prospect, you see, Jimmy along with his brothers and sister, lived in a house much like mine, except Jimmy’s parents weren’t like mine, in fact they weren’t like anyone’s parents in the neighborhood that I knew of, this fact would ultimatley give me my first encounter with child protective services … I of course expressed my objections to playing at Jimmy’s house, because in the words of a brutally honest 6 year old, Jimmy’s house was “junky”. Sure I had been there before, heck, I had been there many times before, and let me tell you, ”junky” was expressing the living conditions mildly.

Jimmy’s house was not well kept, although the back yard was hidden by a privacy fence, it was obvious these were not the neighbors you would like to have. The front yard had several old lawn mowers in various states of disrepair a car under the carport that didn’t operate and another on the side of the house. The grass however was kept up by a cobbled together push mower used by Jimmy’s older brother Chris. This meant of course that the “junky” house just had the grass cut, nothing else. Jimmy’s youngest brother was in diapers and those diapers frequently made their way into the yard as if by magic. I find it amazing, that even at this early time, while every other struggling parent in our neighborhood was using cloth diapers, Jimmy’s brother had disposables, and they got disposed of right in the front yard along with all sorts of other personal hygene products. I don’t know if they purposefully threw them out there or if they failed to pick up after the dogs dumped the trash can, either way, they were there, the flies were plentiful, and the smell was atrocious. Inside the house was no better, doors were off the hinges, windows were broken out and the dog had messed in the floor and had not been cleaned up. I could never imagine having to live in such squalor and filth, it was certainly not a place I wished to go play.

Then, like a thief in the night, Jimmy and his siblings disappeared, they weren’t abducted though, child protective services had come in and taken the children away, from the youngest to the oldest, all were moved to foster care. Of course “we” knew where they were, even if their parents didn’t, since the parents were not allowed to have contact with the kids, and we were, we found out where they lived. A mere 5 blocks from their old place of squalor.

I don’t know what happened to Jimmy and the rest of his family and I don’t know if they ever came “home”, but I do know that Jimmy took offense to my calling his house “junky”. The rest of the kids used a little more tact than I did, they didn’t express displeasure, even though I could tell from their expressions they knew I was right. I never played “hide and go seek” that day, because even though Jimmy wasn’t a bad kid, he did have a certain amount of pride, and he just couldn’t let my comments go unanswered.

I often wonder about Jimmy and the rest of the gang, where they are and what became of their lives. The queston “Did Jimmy ever go home” likely will never be answered for me. I can only pray that he is living better now than he did then.