Through the Children’s Gate: Excerpts from Third Thanksgiving (part 1)

I’ve decided to do a small essay installation in parts, here… just because every time I read Adam Gopnik, I’m reminded why daily observances and gestures are important. He’s really that good.

This is excerpted from his essay “Third Thanksgiving: Bitterosities”…

“I was reminded of [happiness being equivalent to absorption] this year, when I found my own version of bliss while absorbed in the role of school safety patrol, wandering the neighborhood as a local pro tempore sentinel, a happy member of the new homeland-security culture. Sudden Flatfoot, I would have been called, had I been turned into a Yu-Gi-Oh! card. At Artists & Anglers (pseudonym given to his kids’ school in NY), there is a long-standing requirement that every parent go out on safety patrol at least once a year. The obligation, like the patrol, dates from the seventies, when muggers hid in the subway station and thieves around the corner, when the park was dangerous, nightfall brought its risks, and kids really did get mugged occasionally on their way home.

These days the likeliest crime, I suppose, is some overstoked stockbroker stopping a seventh-grader to try and steal his attention-deficit medication. But the tradition persists, partly because it always has, partly because we are superstitious that if we stop it, the muggings will come back. (That’s what a cultural tradition is, a pointless habit everyone is too scared to stop, like venerating Johnny Hallyday in France).

I went to the school at three-thirty on the assigned day and was given my regalia:  an eye-shatteringly orange safety vest and a walkie-talkie that made reassuring static noises when you pressed the talk button, and with which I was to stay in touch with home base at Artists & Anglers in case of an emergency, the shape, structure and possible location of which were all left comfortably undefined.  Then I was given my security perimeter:  a three-block beat up and down Eighty-eighth Street (where Martha and I first lived in our nine-by-eleven basement room for three years), down to Eighty-seventh Street, and back.  I was supposed to have a partner, one of the more determinedly artistic mothers, but she somehow hadn’t shown.  I had to go solo.  I didn’t mind.  It made me more of the real Lethal Weapon thing–a cop with a beat, a grievance, and a lost partner.

[Click here to go to part 2: http://jamesliou.com/liouwp/?p=328]