I saw a little boy in the mall today. I almost did not notice him, except that he was only about six and alone, and when he walked past me I saw that he was crying. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that he must have lost his parents. It turned out that he had lost his granny. His name was Jerome and he was trying not to cry, but you could see that he was just barely hanging on to his last nerve and was a hair’s breath away from blind panic. I could not get him to stop, he kept walking and looking frantically around, answering my questions (what’s wrong, are you lost, what’s your name) in such a soft voice that I could not hear everything he was saying.
The mall was so noisy – Christmas carols blasting, people rushing in every which direction, all seeming to be talking at the same time. I had to bend almost double to get on eye level with him, but I could see that as far as he was concerned I was just getting in his way of finding his granny. He wanted to keep walking until he found her, not answer my questions. He knew she was somewhere in the vicinity and he was not supposed to talk to strangers anyway. I tried to reassure him – don’t worry, I’ll get somebody to make a loud announcement and your granny will come and get you, I told him. But at the same time I was trying to figure out a way to get him to go with me to the Mall office – heck, I was trying to figure out where the hell the Mall office was! As I was walking and talking to him, to my great relief he suddenly saw his granny in the distance – he must have sharp eyes because there were a lot of people in the mall – and he took off and half-ran, half-trotted, towards her.
She was with a younger woman and two little girls and I expected her to show some signs of relief when she saw him. A short, plain woman of in her late 40’s, with black rimmed glasses and a white dress, she looked like a Coco-Panyol. Expecting a different reaction, I was so disappointed to see that when he went up to her, she immediately started to scold him. I was too far away to hear what she was saying, but you could tell she was not happy – grabbing him by the shoulder and shoving him, gesticulating and pointing to him as she spoke to the other woman, who seemed not in the slightest bit interested. He just stood there, a little behind her, with his head hanging, his eyes sad and his little face worried.
He looked so downcast that I had to say something. So I walked to meet them. "Hello Jerome's granny - I'm glad he found you - he was so frightened... I guess you were frightened too, right?" Apparently not. She didn’t look frightened, relieved, or even marginally happy. What she looked was pissed off. She told me that she had told Jerome not to stop to watch a demonstration of a remote control helicopter with flashing lights all over it - and he did!!! Clearly a mortal sin, punishable by neglect, if not deliberate abandonment.
I was trying not to say anything, or say anything in a way that would make things worse for Jerome. But I could not just pretend that her actions were a-okay. So I said, as lightly as possible, "Well granny, what do you expect - he's a little boy - I would want to watch that helicopter myself!!" I hope that what I said sunk in, or will eventually sink in, but at the time she was clearly not amused and she walked on with the two little girls gawking at me over their shoulders and Jerome trailing behind.
But then, I was not particularly amused either. In fact it ruined my whole mood and I had to leave the mall. I was very near to tears – I thought of all the Jeromes in the world who are looked after physically but neglected and abused emotionally. No wonder we have so many young men (and women) who have no sympathy or compassion for anybody and who don’t think particularly highly of anything – including themselves. Children truly are what they learn. And all Jerome learned today was that his granny could be trusted only to make him unhappy.
Going into the mall at Christmas time is nothing if not an education in child rearing practices in this country. For instance, there was a young couple with their two daughters getting a bite to eat in the food court – the man had the younger daughter (about a year old) on his lap and he was sharing his Coke with her. I mean that literally – he did not just give her a sip or two – she had 50% of a large glass of Coca Cola. God alone know what that amount of sugar can do to an infant.
I walked behind a young mother and her little daughter for quite a while as we headed in the same direction. The little girl, who seemed to be about 4 or 5, was dressed to the nines, from the crown of her head to the tip of her shoes, all bows and frills and glitter. She was holding her mother’s hand and quite often had to run to keep up with her. Her mother did not notice her daughter’s discomfort because she was talking on her cell phone the whole time. In fact, when I got to a store I wanted to go into, and they walked on past it, she was still talking on the phone and the little girl was still trotting behind her in an effort to make her age 4 legs match her mother’s age 22 stride.
And it goes on and on – parents who create literally hundreds of “don’ts” and enforce exactly none of them - the mother who takes her 3 year old son into a store selling costume jewellery and tells the child not to touch anything, while she wanders around and leaves him to touch every thing in sight; or the father who watches on in an apparent stupor while his daughter tries her best to pull the decorations off of the trees dotted throughout the mall. These are children who are accustomed to doing what they want, coupled with parents who don’t pay attention to them. The result is Jerome. The result is also children who are abducted, raped and killed in alarming numbers every year in this country. If I wanted to, I could have abducted Jerome. Nobody was paying attention, the mall was so noisy and busy it would have gone unnoticed. And he is a thin, obviously docile little boy, who would not have been able to put up too much of a fight. All I had to do was tell him that I knew where his granny was and that I would take him to her. Abduction accomplished. Then you would have seen one more granny on TV News, holding her head and bawling, and saying “If I did only know!!!”
