Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Brevet. Temporary military promotion, traditionally given in the field during combat. Came up in a brief commentary about U.S. Grant.

Still have to read his autobiography.

2) Stuffers. As in stocking stuffers. Doesn’t it seem like this should be the easiest part of the whole Christmas gift thing?

Trips me up every single year.

3) Carols. I love Christmas music. I mean really and truly and probably pathologically loooove Christmas music. So much so that we have an unbreakable rule around the house: no Christmas music until the day AFTER Thanksgiving. Which is now.

You have been warned.

4. Range. Came upon a new term for me while reading the Sunday papers: “home range.” It is meant to denote the diameter of a circle center of which is a family home and the perimeter of which defines the distance that children are allowed to roam without adult supervision. While I like the term very much–it fits the bill for my never-ending quest for accurate vocabulary with which to frame a discussion–what I went on to discover about the arc of the home range over history is kinda sad actually.

Turns out it has been shrinking without objective cause for decades.

I am a child of America, born and raised here as were my parents and as was Beth. In the 1950’s the “home range” was measured in miles, and it became “open” to children as young as 7 or 8. This was largely the case for me and for my siblings in the 60’s suburbia of our youth. We had the run of our neighborhood in early grade school; heck, we walked about 3/4 of a mile to our elementary school. Once we got our first banana bikes we could ride pretty much anywhere on our side of “downtown” without so much as a “I’ll be at so-and-so’s” to our Moms. The run of the town arrived with 10-speed bikes around age 12 or so.

There was nothing particular or unusual about our experiences. Pretty much anyone in my generation had the same story to tell. Nor was this a rural or suburban experience. I vividly remember stories told by friends and acquaintances of riding the NYC subways solo as young as Middle School. We weren’t exactly completely “free range”, but our particular version of “in the wild” gave us a pretty wide berth.

The “stranger danger” responsible for the declining home range available to today’s children is almost certainly overblown by several orders of magnitude. If children are taken by an adult it is dramatically more likely to be a family member and done as part of a domestic dispute. I think the way the author of this particular article put it was you’d need to use 750 years of total episodes to objectively explain this decrease in home range.

What then, you might ask, is the downside of having children always under the eye of a family member? Well, there are theories that “free range” play without the intersession of adults leads to less anxiety and more self-confidence in children. Let me admit that I am way over my skis when it comes to this; not even remotely an area of expertise. Except, it does make some sense, no? Especially in light of my experiences as a child. Yes, for sure we had stuff like Little League baseball starting at age 8. But at least in my little dying mill town with three elementary schools we also had neighborhood vs. neighborhood 9 on 9 baseball games on random fields all over town. We swam in the town pool, but we also swam in any number of backyard pools and random reservoirs. We watched over each other because, well, that’s just what you did.

We only called in the adults when some kind of emergency came up and we just couldn’t grok it and solve it on our own.

Was it a different time? Sure. For one there were no drugs being dealt on the playgrounds. Still, we collectively managed not only ourselves but any conflicts that arose. We learned how to compete and then leave that competition on the field. How to make friends with total strangers, all the while totally unaware that a year or two or three we’d be sitting together in English class at the Junior High School when our home range had effectively grown to include the entire town.

Maybe this is just the nostalgic musings of an old man coming off a holiday that is designed to trigger such stuff. I dunno. Still, if you close your eyes and think back, wasn’t it just like this when you were a kid? Sitting on the lawn of a friend’s house when the street lights came on and saying “see ya tomorrow”. Your bike as much of a freedom chariot as any ’50’s roadster in a Happy Days episode (google it!). Slowly, over time, your home range extended to all four corners of your home town. Your turf, the same. You learned how to meet and befriend people through pedal power. Maybe even got an extra piece of Thanksgiving pie along the way.

I’m way past the stages where I was “ranged in”, or indeed any of mine were. But I remember. I remember that the lessons I learned on the outer edges of my rather large home range sent me out into the world well-equipped whenever I met someone on the other side of whatever town I found myself in. I ate a lot of pie.

Our kids and our grandkids could surely do the same.

I hope you and yours had a very happy Thanksgiving. I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2025 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.