Stranger Danger
A Warning From An Almost Milk Carton Kid To Our Younger Selves
We moved into a new neighborhood when I was in 2nd grade, or 7 years old. It was the 80′s, and the neighborhood was your typical suburban neighborhood where houses were being built like wildfire and a steady stream of new families was moving to the neighborhood each weekend. If they lived close by and if they had kids my age, I would eagerly knock on their front door after school and ask if they wanted to play.
As kids, we spent most of our time exploring outdoors when we weren’t in school. Our neighborhood was bordered by forest to the East that we would wander through aimlessly for hours at a time. During summer breaks and on the weekends, we left in the morning after completing our chores that mom handwrote on a post-it stuck to the fridge with tasks like, “unload dishwasher, vacuum game room, clean out kitty litter.” If I was lucky, my friends finished their chores first then would come to help me with mine.
After marking off each “to-do” on the pale yellow post-it, we would ride our pink and grey bikes to pick up other friends on their pink and grey bikes and we didn’t return until sundown. When the streetlights came on, you better be home.
Driving through the neighborhood at dusk, you would see kids’ bikes scattered across front lawns with basketballs sitting next to basketball hoops that the dad cemented beside the driveway or left freestanding in a cul-de-sac. Pink and white hula hoops were scattered across driveways with neon-colored skateboards, red and silver pogo sticks and the green water hose still dripping water from the kids not turning the faucet far enough after drinking fresh, cold water from the hose. The Coleco and Atari revolution was yet to come.
One day in 3rd grade, or 8 years old, I was walking towards the woods to play as I normally did. My friends were already ahead of me by 15 minutes, so I walked alone. As I was stepping onto the curb to enter the woods, I saw a man from the corner of my left eye walking towards me. He looked like he could’ve been any one of my friends’ dads, wearing stonewashed “dad” pants pulled up past his waist, with tapered legs that were tight rolled just above his white Reeboks. He was wearing a typical dad t-shirt that must’ve been from a Mexican vacation with his family that read, “Cancun,” in puffy neon paint across the chest.
As I continued to walk towards the woods, he continued to approach and I saw he had a look of panic. I was immediately concerned, not for me but for him. It was clear he was frantically looking for something or someone. As his eyes darted from side to side, he asked, “Have you seen my dog? He is red and looks like a wiener dog.”
As a matter of fact, I had seen this dog! My best friend that lived behind my house and I unofficially adopted a dog that frequented the neighborhood and we named him, “Frank.” He played with us and followed us around until it was time to go home, including Frank. We never knew where Frank went at night, so this must be Frank’s dad, I thought.
“Yes, I’ve seen him!” I was excited that an adult asked me for help!
“Would you help me find him?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, “But I need to ask my dad!”
Without leaving time for a response from the man in the stone-washed jeans, I turned around and darted home like a cheetah. The man in the jeans needed my help.
After proudly swinging open our backdoor and kicking off my shoes, I ran towards my dad’s study while proudly shouting, “A man, this man wants me to help him find his dog! Me! Can I Dad, please?”
I was certain my dad would realize I wasn’t a kid anymore after hearing of the man in the pants who asked for my help. I imagined my dad immediately regretting all of those times he said no to my requests to mow the lawn like my older brother instead of being assigned to weeding the flower beds every Saturday morning.
But, my dad reacted in a way I didn’t expect. He was furious, which was normal, but it was mixed with concern and fear, which was unusual. His face turned red and his temper burst through the seams of his tightly wound face. This took skill, but I’d seen it enough that it no longer impressed me.
He flew out of his tufted, leather office chair, almost knocking over his Coke on crushed ice, and he screamed at me to “NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS! DAMMIT, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME!? NEVER!” with several choice words to follow, some of which were new to me as I tried not to laugh and he tried to maintain composure.
This routine was standard. I did something that was childlike or inappropriate, my Dad lost his shit, then he screamed until I was sufficiently terrified, followed by the dad leather belt snap when necessary. If I had questions, I could think about those in the corner I would sit facing Indian style for one hour.
After sufficiently unleashing his fury, my dad flew past me with his mid-calf white athletic socks, white Reebok low tops (they were the new hightops) and his ridiculously short shorts and out our front door. I looked through the study blinds to see him looking down the street from side to side and scouring the edge of the woods. His yellow shorts were hard to miss against the green backdrop of the pine tree filled woods. By then, the man in the stonewashed dad pants who lost his dog was no longer standing at the corner. He must’ve found his dog.
One year later, my best friend and I learned that our neighborhood dog, Frank, was really named Pharaoh, and he belonged to the very nice Indian family who lived directly behind my house. We were eavesdropping on my parents as normal kids do. They laughed as they remembered the father coming to our house a year earlier to ask my dad why we kept taking Pharaoh into the woods and wondering who was Frank? Two weeks later, I almost helped the man in the dad jeans and Cancun t-shirt look for a dog that wasn’t his.
At that age, I was incapable of understanding the horrors of what the milk carton kids endured. I only knew that our milk cartons suddenly had pictures of missing kids on them who looked just like me and my friends. I wondered where they went. If they were okay? Today, I know that there was very little difference between me and them. They started their day just like mine, and they were on their way to play with friends like I was when a man looking for his dog asked for help.
I was only one decision away from experiencing the same horror that I imagine they experienced, as they helped the charming man from their neighborhood look for his lost dog. What did he look like? Did he look the same as mine, wearing the same Cancun t-shirt I imagined he bought during a family vacation with his wife and three daughters?
Within a blink of an eye, their world changed. I imagine the terror and confusion they felt as their body responded to danger before their mind could catch up. I imagined how they felt as the jolt of hot, electric-filled adrenaline dumped into their bloodstream pushing it like a tidal wave from their body towards their chest then to their cheeks in a final attempt to help the outmatched child flee the full-grown man. Did his charming blue eyes turn to empty black vessels as soon as they rounded the corner out of view of their house?
I imagine my dad was no different than thousands of other parents during the panic-filled ’80s who feared their children would be the next victim of child abduction and their school portrait would adorn a milk carton with the big bold caption, “MISSING.” It was only two years earlier, in 1984, when John and Reve Walsh and other child advocates founded The National Center For Missing And Exploited Children.* The only difference is that my dad’s fear was almost realized when his eight-year-old daughter asked if she could help the strange man on the corner look for his lost dog. That was my first and only lesson in stranger danger, which was enough for me to be sufficiently warned.
I never saw the man in the stone-washed jeans again, and my best friend and I still played with Pharaoh almost every day after school. Right or wrong, I believe my dad felt safe knowing that he had struck enough fear in his daughter, that I was conditioned to ask his permission before doing much of anything on my own. I now had two men to fear: one inside my home and one out. I remained in a state of constant fear while alone and in the presence of any man older than me, even my brother and my brother's friends.
Later that year, two of my other best girlfriends were walking from one of their houses to the other, which was six streets back and four streets over. Towards the middle of their walk, a strange man approached in his car and asked for directions. When they walked towards his car door to help, they noticed his strange smile as if he knew something they didn't. As they looked at the piece of paper he was holding with an imaginary address, they saw that his pants were unzipped and his erect penis was exposed. That was their first introduction to the private anatomy of a grown man. They quickly ran off in a state of horror and confusion, embarrassed by what they'd just seen.
How lucky were we three to never become milk carton kids?
Epilogue
While finalizing my story and before hitting publish, an AMBER Alert popped up on my screen. It was accompanied by the loud emergency alert alarms we are all familiar with so the public is on alert for a car holding another abducted child. According to NCMEC, 941 children have been successfully recovered as a result of the AMBER Alert program, including 55 recoveries credited to the wireless emergency alert program.*
Although our channels for distributing information about abducted children have evolved significantly since the eighties, the means of child abduction have not. Children continue to be taken against their will from their home, the street or other public facilities and thrown into the backseat or trunk of their abductor’s car.
The emergency alert I received today is a stark reminder that we’ve made little progress in the past 30 years to reduce the number of child abductions. Perhaps we can begin to think outside of the box as a society to ensure that in 30 years from today, we have not only advanced our means to quickly distribute information about child abductions as soon as they’ve taken place, but we have also significantly reduced the number of child abductions.
- About NMEC. (2019, January 14). Retrieved from http://www.missingkids.com/footer/media/keyfacts
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Median publication
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