Life at Ten

The World Has Changed

My blog posts are usually lighthearted. I’m sorry, but this one is not.

Ten-year-olds have been in the news a lot lately. There’s the ten-year-old Ohio girl who was forced to travel to Indiana to end a pregnancy forced upon her by a rapist.

There are the 19 Texas children, all about ten-years-old, who were brutally murdered by a gunman with a military grade weapon, as well as all their traumatized classmates.

Those horrible news stories have gotten me thinking about ten-year-olds and what life is like at ten.

I turned ten in June 1964. I’d just finished up fourth grade, and summer vacation had just begun. I celebrated my birthday with several close school girlfriends at a pool party in our backyard. My homemade cake looked like a Barbie-style one-piece bathing suit—blue with white polka dots. We played dive-for-the-rings, shot water at one another with ten-cent squirt guns, and giggled as we slid down the slide to land with a splash.

The summer stretched out deliciously in front of me. For hours, I played Barbies in the shade of a giant tree with the neighborhood girls. We spread our Barbie stuff all over the lawn—Barbie’s house and car and wardrobe. Sometimes, we climbed up into a backyard treehouse the neighborhood boys had built, skated or biked in a parade around the block, and played kickball in the quiet neighborhood street. There was hopscotch and jump-rope, too. Sometimes we made up treasure hunts for the boys, or followed written hints to ones they’d created for us. I’d be away from home all day, hanging out with my friends and always busy. Once a week, we girls walked to the town library to exchange one stack of books for another. Mysteries were my favorite, and I inhaled Nancy Drew stories.

The rule was, “Be home when the streetlights come on.” And I almost always was.

All the family—grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins—attended our town’s Fourth of July parade and then came to our house for a day of swimming and BBQing. After dark, we kids played with sparklers before Dad set off our backyard fireworks show. When my favorite book ever, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, came out as a movie a few days later, Mom dropped my friend and me off at the movie theater. The dollar she gave me covered the double feature and a snack, too. (That was the moment when I learned that the movie is never as good as the book.)

Later that summer, for the entire month of August, my family—my younger sister, Mom and Dad, and me—road-tripped across the country. This was an expedition my dad had been yearning to do for a long time. My folks had saved up for years. We rode in the brand-new blue Buick station wagon they’d purchased just for the occasion. It even had air conditioning! (On previous vacations, my folks had mounted one of those breeze-driven ice-water coolers in the passenger-side window.)

Heading east we visited the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, the Alamo and New Orleans. We walked the battlefields at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. I especially loved our days in Williamsburg and Washington, DC.  We saw Niagara Falls and crossed the Canadian border to see Quebec City. (That trip is probably the source of my adult wanderlust and my love of American history.)

I was introduced to some odd customs along the way that were foreign to this California girl, and my parents had a tough time explaining them to me. In the South, there were water fountains and bus benches and public bathrooms labeled “White” and “Colored” and signs over store and restaurant doors that read “Whites Only” and worse.

Ten is the year when children really begin to learn about the world beyond their family and community. The news penetrates their worlds. But there are many things that they are totally unaware of. Ten-year-old tend to be nice and kind and trusting.

I had brought food and water and blankets to school a year prior during the Cuban Missile Crisis, just in case. My fourth-grade teacher had wept when she informed us that President Kennedy had been shot, and I watched the news coverage on the TV that evening. We watched Gemini rockets take off on TV, and my dad had us stand in the front yard to watch the night sky for the manned flights. But that’s about as much as the world or national news penetrated my ten-year-old consciousness.

There was so much I didn’t know, so much I was protected from knowing. I didn’t know where babies came from or how they were made. My female classmates and I wouldn’t see “the movie” until fifth grade. I was completely uninterested in boys and thought most of them were icky. My family never owned a gun. My dad’s experience in the Pacific Theater in WWII was enough to put him off guns of any kind for the rest of his life. I would be in my late twenties before I saw a real gun, and then it made me very uncomfortable.

Flash forward 58 years.

It is beyond my comprehension that a grown man would/could inflict the terror of rape on a ten-year-old girl. I can’t understand how a ten-year-old, who needed an abortion, would/could be denied that life-saving medical treatment by the men in power who are supposed to be using their power to protect our children.

It is beyond belief that a gun dealer would/could sell a military grade gun and lots of ammunition to anyone, but especially to an obviously troubled young man. It’s beyond comprehension that a young man would/could carry out a plan to use a gun to slaughter sweet, innocent, and beloved ten-year-olds in what should have been the safety of their classrooms. I can’t understand how a score of heavily armed, but cowardly, law enforcement officers would/could mill around aimlessly outside an unlocked classroom door listening while a gunman used a deadly weapon to shoot and kill children and the children cried out for help.

Ten years old!

It’s summer vacation.

They should be swimming in pools, playing with Barbies, riding their bikes, reading mystery stories, drawing with crayons, or sitting in treehouses.

What is it you were doing at ten?

How can we protect our children?