Take heart! We still have safety keepers

We visit cemeteries to grieve the loss of people we love, but where do we go to grieve the loss of an entire way of life?

I choose Audubon Park. Here, in this north Spokane park, my childhood friends and I spent summer days. We hopped on wooden swings and sang songs. We played on metal monkey bars and scraped our elbows when we fell to the concrete below. We slid down the steep, steel slide that grew dangerously warm in the sun.

I have memorized the trees of Audubon Park and dream of them still, though it’s been 40 years since Audubon was my summer hangout.

Our mothers did not accompany us to the park. They did not worry. There were sex offenders back then, certainly, and we were warned of strangers, but children of my baby-boomer generation roamed free through Spokane summers.

This freedom is dead for today’s children.

As I write these words, a father walks to Audubon’s swing set with eight young children in tow. He knows the children by name – Come here Justine and Tyler! – so my assumption that he’s a dad, watching his kids and some of their friends, seems a safe one. Men seen alone with small children can sometimes fall into suspicion – another loss of innocence to grieve.

If Marcia Black-Gallucci of Spokane needed a mourning place for the loss of her childhood way of life, she would choose Liberty Lake. There, in the 1950s and ‘60s, she and her seven siblings spent summers roaming the beaches and hillsides.

Marcia’s mother worried about one of the children getting stuck by a fish hook. She worried about boats traveling too close to the children as they swam. But she never worried about a sex offender driving down the road, spotting her children and then stopping the car to do them irreparable harm.

I called Marcia this week because she is a legal advocate and crisis intervention specialist with the Victim Rights Response Team of Lutheran Community Services. I told her I needed some words to say to the little ones in my life to help keep them safe.

We adults, frightened ourselves, must be careful not to utter words that invoke paralyzing fear among our young ones. During Fourth of July celebrations at Riverfront Park, a newspaper colleague overheard a mother say to her young children: “Stay close, because there are children being abducted right and left!”

There are not. Kidnappings, and molestation, by strangers are still acts more rare than common. Children are much more likely to be molested by relatives or family acquaintances.

So Marcia says to the little ones in her life: “There are parts of your body that are private, and nobody should touch them. If someone touches you, no matter who it is, you have to tell Mom and Dad right away. You never have to keep a secret.”

Marcia, who for two decades has helped children heal from horror, finds that sometimes she, too, feels helpless in the face of the evil enacted upon our children. Sometimes, all she can do is pray.

As I finish these words, the father and the children at Audubon have moved from the swings – made of rubber now instead of wood – into the play area where a bark-filled surface has replaced the concrete. The metal monkey bars and the “danger slide” are long gone.

Two of the children run up a hill toward Finch Elementary School. The father calls them back, wishing them to remain within eye range.

Forty years ago, my friends and I skipped up the hill all the way to Finch Elementary, no adults warning us to stay within range. I mourn that these children will never possess the same freedom of movement.

But I also feel thankful for the Marcia Black-Galluccis in our community, for the fathers and mothers and other adults who call our children back to safety, day after day.

Take heart, at the end of this saddest week, that the good ones, the safety keepers, far outnumber the evil ones. This is the belief I tuck alongside my memorized trees in Audubon Park, the stuff of childhood dreams.