Wanted

My son has a tendency of wandering outside our house and yelling at all the neighbor kids to come over and play with him. Some of my neighbors I like, others, well...But if this happens it is an unknown rule that I am the one that has to go out and either get him in and send the kids away or hang out with whatever parent has come over because their kid ran away. That is sometimes fun and sometimes excruciatingly awkward because some of my neighbors like me and others, well…

There are even times when this kid will go outside and just invite over a random stranger. He loves to talk to people. Anyone. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked out my window and there is a group of strangers he has invited down our driveway to show them something or chat their ear off. Even salesmen are fair game. Maybe even criminals.

My parents didn’t have to worry about this so much when I was a kid growing up in a small town because all children back then were pretty much free-range. They could come and go until the sun went down as long as they didn’t bring anyone back inside their house. There had to of been times even back then that they didn’t want me out and about for safety reasons but I can not recall them ever once forcing me to stay home. Well, that was, unless I was being punished.

Yesterday, I was standing in a long line at my local post office. I had to mail out something urgently and it was the kind of line where you know you’re going to be there forever so you might as well resign and accept the misery. As I was there I was thinking about the old post office I had growing up. It was a beautiful old building with walls lined with classic post office boxes of varying sizes. Nice woodwork, an imposing counter, happy employees. All the things that mine does not have. It also had a special area on the wall for the FBI’s most wanted criminals. As I recall it had quite a few hanging binders that you could scroll through and see if the neighbor you didn’t like was there.

I do not know what the rules are for these things. These FBI posters. I would assume they are federal property and not to be messed with, but tawdry rules were never something that detoured my father. He would go up to the post office every now and then and rip a couple of those bad boys off the wall and stuff them in his pocket like some sort of hillbilly bounty hunter. Except he wasn’t looking to collect a bounty from a dangerous criminal. He was looking to detain someone else. Me.

It would always be sometime in the later afternoon. He would come home and take me aside. “Son, I need you to be on the lookout for someone.” I would be confused and he’d pull out a piece of paper from his back pocket and slowly unfold it. “You see this guy?” I’d look over the paper. “You see this guy? Pretty sure I just saw him driving down Greenwood Street in a big white van. FBI’s looking for ‘em. Kidnapper.”

Terrified, would be an understatement of how I felt when he did that the first few times. Instead of running over to a friend’s house or being a free-range child, I would hide inside and peer out the window. Watching. Waiting. Every time a white van would go by my heart would jump. I am not sure if the old man felt sorry for me or was ashamed. Eventually, he started picking criminals with big rewards and would encourage me to search for them. He even had me convinced that Osama Bin Laden was living in a low-income apartment complex a couple of blocks from the house and all I had to do was find him and we’d be millionaires.

I have to say as I stood in the never-ending line at the post office that I was a little disappointed there weren’t any of those FBI posters hanging on the walls. There was a brief moment of fantasy where I pictured myself whipping out one of those posters and terrifying my son so he wouldn’t run out and invite all the neighbor kids over. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an area where he can be free-range, so for his sake, I will endure the awkward hemming and hawing about the weather and pollen. Oh, and knowing my kid, we’ve probably already met the top 10 most wanted and not even known about it, so really, what's the point.