The next time you hear kids playing outside, take a minute away from your constant diatribe about how kids these days should spend more time outdoors and away from their iPads, and make a quick call to the police to have that kid picked up and plopped in front of a foster family's wide-screen.
Because Florida shouldn't be the only state where people do ass things.
You may have heard about the family in Florida who had their children taken away from them because their 11-year-old son got home to a locked, empty house and played basketball for an hour and a half in his driveway until his parents got home from work. A neighbor called the police, who went to the house, put the kid in the back of the cruiser to wait for the parents, during which time the cop took a leak in the yard. When the parents finally got home, they were arrested and put in jail for child negligence.
This story proves two points I've long believed: One, Florida isn't really a state at all. It's part of a social experiment to see how much normal people can withstand before fleeing to the Carolinas, leaving the Sunshine State to the over-70 crowd. All the Toys R Us stores will be turned into Beall's and all the pediatrician offices will be dedicated to doing colonoscopies and prostate exams. Arresting people for stupid things and parading octogenarians up and down the beach in bikinis and Speedos is a calculated plan to get rid of anyone who wants to eat dinner past 3 p.m.
And two, neighbors hate when the basketball is left out. Ninety minutes of listening to a ball hitting a cement driveway is enough to drive anyone to call 911. Please. I can't stand it anymore. Take him away. I understand there's a nice room at juvy five miles from here.
People are all up in arms about these parents losing their kids and they should be. Apologies for going all good old days on you, but if a neighbor had called the police on the kids in my neighborhood when I was 11, the Hubbard cops would have sprayed Sanka out of their noses.
I know who it would be, too. Our neighborhood's own Mr. Wilson on the corner who used to yell at us for walking on his grass and who refused to give candy on Halloween to kids he didn't recognize from the neighborhood. Now that I think of it, he refused to give candy to the kids he did recognize, because he loathed all of us. Even those of us who cleaned erasers for our teachers after school. It could have been worse for the old guy. And what did he expect, living on the corner? We couldn't be expected to go all the way to the edge of the sidewalk and make a right-angle turn when we're down to an hour before Barbie and Ken's homecoming dance. What was his grass made of anyway, cashmere?
When I was in high school my friends and I were driving around Hubbard near Halloween when we saw a fake person hanging by a noose on someone's front porch. Being the overly dramatic high school kids that we were, we screamed and drove around some more until we came across a police cruiser, which we stopped and in many overlapping high pitched voices told the cop that it looked like there was a real body hanging on the porch. We repeated that "it's not right" and "they shouldn't be allowed to do that" and "ohmygod you guys."
Looking back, this policeman's patience was remarkable. He listened to us and then he said this, and I'm paraphrasing: "People are allowed to do whatever they want on their own property and you can't go around making them stop."
The police department was not in the business of taking away anyone's kids, certainly not for allowing an 11-year-old to play outside for a couple hours. Shoot, they weren't in the business of making anyone do anything. They relied on us as good citizens to handle it on our own. My brother's hunting dog, Rusty, barked non-stop for hours in his pen, and the neighbors threw him a bone, literally, to shut him up. The fact that they threw it like a torpedo and aimed for Rusty's head is neither here nor there. Because that's how you handled it when your neighbors' screw-ups crossed the property line and spilled over into your life.
I'm quite certain my friends and I annoyed more than just our own Mr. Wilson on the corner. We played unsupervised outside from the time we could reach the doorknob. I don't think I ever saw an adult step foot on the playground. Who would want to? The place was covered with crabapples and comic books. As far as I know, there were landmines that were triggered by anyone wearing anything other than Red Ball Jets.
Most of the games we played involved screaming, high-pitched laughing, and repetitive noises such as yanking on the Roosevelt School doors knowing that they were chained shut. We seemed to get a kick out of the sound of the clanking chain especially when it echoed through the gymnasium.
If the neighbors turned up their TV sets loud enough to block us out, we occasionally would go to them. Knocking on doors was a thing people did then. My friend Nancy and I sold cookies door-to-door once. Not for any club, just decided to bake a bunch of cookies and sell them. We told people that we were raising money to buy Nancy's mom flowers in the hospital, but we both knew that when Nancy's dad heard about this, he would reimburse us and then some.
My point is, kids are annoying. It's their job. But as long as the neighborhood kid isn't bouncing his basketball off your picture window, don't bother the cops. Unless you live in Florida, and then knock yourself out. If you can find one left who's young enough to drive the cruiser.
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Read more of Diane's Just Humor Me columns here. Sign up for our weekly e-newsletter to get new blog post notifications. And if you like her blog, you'll love her book, Home Sweet Homes: How Bundt Cakes, Bubble Wrap, and My Accent Helped Me Survive Nine Moves.