Growing up in Redlands

When I was a real little kid my mother told me to hold her hand, to look both ways, twice, to always stay where I could see her, not to talk to strangers and a dozen potential disasters that might follow if I did--these, to my mind, were the normal forebodings of the mother of a child in a fearsome world.


When I got a bit older and I needed to get away, I would come out from the inside places of our house at night and sit under the streetlamp on the curb. I would look down our tame suburban street, look up at the warm Southern California sky, and think how cruel it all was. Here there were poor people and homeless people--how did no one else take care of them?--there were killers and criminals--would they hurt me too?--dangers and uncertainties and limitless imaginative potentials.

And I hardly knew it, but some deeper part of me was thinking, half with fear and half with yearning, this is the beginning of the real world, it starts right here and stretches out beyond the unknown, this is it.