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Non-fiction

Updated: Oct 20, 2021

I have a couple of books of non-fiction out there, and a lot of the pieces have been published in various journals and lit mags. This piece was recently published in a new format, Kindle Vella, which I guess people read on their phones and watches. It was fun learning how to use Kindle Vella, and fun remembering how crazy my youngest child made me back in the good old days. Fortunately, he has survived and stopped being a die-hard runaway - although he still loves to travel!



My Little Runaway


There it was before me, a tableau of what could've been, a child tethered to his mother by a flexible leash as if she were walking a puppy. The towheaded tyke tried to run in front of a car and the mother jerked him back in the nick of time.

Years ago, that could have been me. Back in those days, putting a leash on a child seemed inappropriate, but I must admit, my son, Bryan, challenged my belief. There was nothing that could hold him. This was a child who came into the world after a mere two-and-a-half-hours of labor. First, he learned to crawl. Then he learned to run. There was nothing in between. We made every effort to child proof our house. We put goat latches at every door, six feet off the ground. We had the windows nailed shut. If we'd had a fire, we all would have died.

The car seat we bought for him when he was born was built like a space capsule. For the first few months of his life, my husband, Ken, had to put him in it because I couldn’t figure out how to buckle him in the damn thing. Reluctantly, I learned to manipulate the series of belts, buckles, and durable plastic plates that, if applied incorrectly, could cost the child digits or even future offspring.

One evening, when Bryan was not quite a year old, I set off on a trip to Alabama to visit my parents. I liked to travel at night because the children stayed cooler and slept better. The last time I looked in the back seat, my year-old son and my six-year-old daughter were both snoring. I was driving on a long, boring stretch of interstate highway for about three hours, singing along to the radio to keep myself alert. I remember the song was Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark.

All of a sudden something flew at me from behind and fell into my lap. I screamed and swerved. Somehow, my cunning baby boy had managed to disconnect all the belts, buckles, and plates and, by standing on the edge of his car seat, launched himself over the back seat into my preoccupied arms. I can't tell you how close we came to a wreck and I won't tell you how close I came to spanking a baby.

So when I say we turned our home into a fortress, I mean it. Goat latches are metal strips that attach to a door at the top of it. They’re almost impossible to open unless you’re at their level. Nevertheless, one Saturday morning, just before dawn, the doorbell rang. We were new to the neighborhood. Exhausted parents that we were, we couldn't believe someone was ringing the door bell that early. Not even completely daylight yet. At the door stood a neighbor from down the street, and with her was our two-year-old son wearing only his diaper. "Do you recognize this child?" she asked.

My husband and I stared, dumbfounded. "Bryan?" we both shouted in amazement. "What are you doing out there?"

Our neighbor, a kindly woman who picked up leftover bread and pastries for the homeless from a mini-market down the street, had been there on her morning rounds when she saw my son toddle into the store. He went over to the main counter and asked the man behind it for candy. Since it was still dark, no adult was with him, and he was clad only in a diaper, she astutely assumed that something was wrong with this picture.

Overcoming our embarrassment, we thanked Bryan's rescuer and took him inside. We couldn't figure out how he had escaped. But a quick glance at the gaping back door in the family room demonstrated his modus operandi. He had stacked an ice chest on top of a chair and flipped the goat latch with a broom.

We were so confused. We had two big dogs, a lab and a husky. How could Bryan have escaped without them noticing? "Why didn't the dogs bark?" Ken asked. We looked at each other in horror. Later, the clerk at the mini-market told us that the dogs had accompanied Bryan to the store but when he didn't come out for a while, they ran off merrily down the road – in the opposite direction from our house. We spent the rest of the day tracking down our dogs.

Bryan never went anywhere with me that he didn't run away. I got so tired of losing him in grocery stores and shopping malls that I quit taking him out. I couldn't get a break with the relatives, either. After a while, neither set of grandparents would take him. Once he was staying with my mother in the winter and he snuck out early in the morning. We had a swimming pool that got filled with leaves and gunk during the winter. You couldn’t see the bottom. My mother was using a pool net to try to find him when he came up behind her and said, “Morning.” She was so mad she could barely speak. Another time, he disappeared on his other grandmother when she took him to the beach. She and the lifeguard were frantically looking for him when they found him buried in a sandy pit he had dug nearby. Overall, he disappeared on his grandparents just one too many times, and they refused to have him visit anymore unless his parents came, too. “Maybe when he’s older,” they said kindly.

It’s amazing how different children can be, even those in the same family. Once when my daughter, Jessica, was three years old, she disappeared in a huge drug store. She was a little blonde moppet who could easily have been tucked under some stranger’s arm and kidnapped. And she was friendly enough to go with them! When I couldn't find her, I panicked, running up and down the aisles, asking people in the store if they'd seen her. Suddenly, a voice crackled over the loudspeaker. "Will Jessica's Mommy please come to the back of the store." There sat my child in a wooden chair in the middle of the pharmacy section, her feet dangling in air. As I ran to her, she cried reproachfully, "Mommy, you looossst me." The pharmacist snickered.

Still, when Jessica disappeared, she found a way to let me know where she was. She waited for me to come to her. When Bryan ran away, if we located him at all, he was still running in the other direction.

Bryan was absolutely fearless, always willing to experiment with new thrills. Once I took him to a park on the shore of a small lake. We played on the swings for a while, then walked out onto a nearby dock. At the edge of the wooden structure, a bearded old fisherman sat in a lawn chair, holding multiple cane poles while he waited for a strike. Bryan wandered right to the edge of the dock and looked down. Instantly on red alert, I said, "Bryan, back away from the edge."

"Ah, Maw," the fisherman said, "he ain't going in that water."

I smiled at the old man and grabbed my son's arm firmly. "You heard me, Bryan," I said, pulling him away from the edge that overhung the murky water.

Bryan jerked away and said grumpily, "Oh-kay!" That was the extent of his vocabulary at the time. He knew it didn't really appease me, but he hadn't yet learned to say, "Lay off, will ya?"

The old fisherman said it for him. "Ah, Maw, leave that boy alone. He ain't gonna jump in that water."

Distracted, I turned towards the fisherman and as I did, we both heard the splash.

"Damn," said the old man, "I didn't think he'd jump in that water!"

"No, kidding," I answered. "Can I borrow your fishing pole?"

When Bryan was three, we put him in daycare. Prior to that, he'd always had a private babysitter, and we made sure the sitters knew that, short of tying him up, anything was acceptable to prevent him from disappearing. We warned the daycare staff about his propensity to run away. We could tell from their pitying looks that they felt we were over-protective.

I was at work one morning when my neighbor across the street called me.

"Do you know where your son is?" she asked.

"Of course I do," I answered. "He's at his day care center."

"No, he's not," she said cheerily. "He's in my living room." She had looked out her front window and saw Bryan wheeling up and down the road on his tricycle. Since she didn’t see a parent, she invited him inside to have lunch.

I called the day care center to let them know that they'd lost someone. They knew. The woman on the phone was crying. "Oh, Mrs. Thornton," she said, "I was just about to call you."

Sure you were, I thought. "We found Bryan," I said, and she began to sob. He’d climbed an 8-foot chain link fence and walked the three blocks to our neighborhood. The daycare staff no longer thought I was over-protective.

When he started kindergarten, I laid down the law to his new teacher. This child is a mini-Houdini. Do not trust him. Do not take your eyes off him. Do not assume he’s following you back to your room from lunch. Do not let him go to the bathroom alone. I could see the kindergarten teacher stifling the urge to roll her eyes. But I was a veteran. I could ignore her disdain.

He made it almost to the end of the school year. Then one afternoon I got a call from a secretary. "Hello, Bryan, is at the Long John Silvers Restaurant down the road from the school. The principal would like to know if you want to pick him up or should we pick him up?"

Bryan had run away from his kindergarten class and decided to walk home.

"Oh," I said grimly, "Let me pick him up."

At the fast food restaurant, I discovered my son sitting on the counter, surrounded by toys and food, wearing a paper hat. Fortunately, a passing pedestrian had seen him trying to cross six lanes of traffic alone in front of the mall and decided that something wasn't right. We have often depended upon the kindness of strangers.

On the way home, I launched into a lecture on his lack of consideration. Later, when his teacher called, I held the phone to his ear so he could hear her apologies. "I thought you were the most over-protective mother," she said tearfully. "I'm so sorry I didn't listen to you."

When Bryan was eight, I took him, his sister, and a number of other children to a movie. That day, there had been a murder in our college town. The body of a young girl had been found near the community college, and no one knew what had happened to her. Police warned people to be careful.

The movie let out around midnight, and before I could grab him, Bryan was gone. Now I had a problem. I knew he'd just run away. But I couldn't leave the other children to go look for him. So, I asked the security guard on duty at the midnight movie if he would watch my daughter and her friends while I searched for my missing boy. When I didn't find him right away, I started to get nervous. What if he really was in trouble this time? What if something had happened to him?

The more time passed, the more frantic I became. Then I saw him: hiding around the corner of a building, laughing at me. I leaped through the air, snared him and escorted him, wriggling, back towards the theater. There was a huge line forming for the upcoming midnight movie and I had to drag him past all the young college kids who stared at me like I was the worst mother. I didn't care. He had finally succeeded in making me crazy. "What is the matter with you?" I shrieked, shaking him. "Don't you know there's a murderer out there?" He didn't even have the courtesy to look nervous.

But as I walked by the young crowd, I could heard people whisper, "What a bitch," and worse. I wanted to stop and roar at them, "You have no idea what this child has put me through. If you were in my shoes, you would have spanked him long ago." Or at least made him wear a leash.

Bryan was good for quite a while after the movie incident. I think my over-the-top reaction got through to him, even though he didn't show it at the time.

But when he went away to college in North Carolina, it was as if he’d performed the ultimate disappearing act. We drove him to school and didn’t hear from him for days. When I tried to call him, no one answered the phone in his dorm room, and I didn’t recognize any of the names on his answering machine. I thought I might be calling the wrong number. But I assumed he’d call sooner or later, if only because he'd need money.

A month after the semester started, terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers. I had to speak to my child. I had to be sure he was safe. I left messages on his answering machine, but he didn't call me back.

Finally, I called the Registrar's office. "You have the right number, Mrs. Thornton," an obviously bemused clerk told me. Apparently, I wasn't the only parent calling that day. "I could have a campus police officer go to his dorm room to see if he's okay."

Truly, for one moment I considered it. But then I had a vision of Bryan, humiliated, assuring the campus cop he was fine, then getting in his car and driving across four states to kick my ass. I reconsidered. "No,” I said reluctantly. "I'll just keep calling."

It was my husband's idea to try to call other people in the dorm. "Sometimes dorm numbers are just one off each other," he said helpfully. So, I called up and down Bryan’s dorm hall. Lots of his fellow students knew who he was, but they didn't know where he was at that moment.

Then I had a stroke of genius: Bryan was on a basketball scholarship. His coach was a very polite, southern gentleman. "Why sure, Mrs. Thornton, I'll have Bryan call you right back," he said.

When my son called, you could hear the controlled fury in his voice. "Mom," he said, "you called my coach? My coach? Really?" I smiled to myself.

From that week on, whenever I called him at college, I'd hear a chorus of voices up and down the dorm hall, "Oh Bryyyyyaaaan, your Mommy's calling." I'm sure he had to spend the next four years living down his reputation as a momma's boy. But after that, he always called me back right away. When you live with a will-o-the-wisp, you take your victories where you can.

Now he lives in New York City. I have a hard time getting in touch with him. He calls me for holidays and on my birthday and he visits regularly. But sometimes, it’s just nice to have contact. I now have the ultimate leash – I just send his wife a Facebook message, and he’s on the phone to me in minutes. All I can say is, God bless technology.

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