As part of its Tween Issue, Time Out New York has a great feature by Rebecca Stead (author of the wonderful When You Reach Me), which you can read here. (Thanks to Mitali Perkins for the link.) I’m about the same age as Rebecca, and love her story about working at the Subway for 40 minutes a day, during her lunch break, when she was 11. (A memory she uses in her book.) That’s totally a scene that could have come from my life.

I’ve often thought about all the stuff my sister and I did around San Francisco at seven, eight, nine, ten years old, and I look at the kids that age I know now and am sure their parents would never give them the same freedom. I’m talking about, say, 1975-1980. Specifically I remember:

…riding all around town with my sister, or alone, on the MUNI system. Our family didn’t have a car. Once every couple of weeks my mom’s boss would let her borrow his car to take care of errands, but otherwise it was all bus, all the time. Involving transfers and waiting on street corners, cold and hungry, with no cell phone or iPod. Oh the humanity!

…walking to school by myself. My grade school was about four blocks away, then in fourth grade I moved to one nine blocks away.

…playing out on the streets with other kids until dark.

…playing out on the streets by myself until dark.

…walking to Golden Gate Park with neighborhood friends to hang out on the playground. My friend Rachel and I buried coins in the woods surrounding the Rose Garden and went to dig them up, later.

…going to Mountain Lake Park with my best friend, Christine, and playing forest primeval, and hanging out in caves in the foothills around her dad’s place, pretending to be super-sleuths. Totally isolated.

…in sixth grade, my school was more like 20 blocks from my house. We’d walk home at a very leisurely pace, up Geary or Clement, stopping for pork buns or piroshki or a Boudin roll, and to look at Hello Kitty stuff, and maybe get home an hour and a half after school was out.

…laundry duty! My sister and I would load up the cart (the kind old Eastern European ladies push/pull home from the grocery store) with dirty clothes, walk the five blocks (uphill!) to the laundromat, and attend to the laundry for a few hours. One thing that made this fun was the wearing of rollerskates, inside the laundromat—until the day my sister fell and busted her chin open, and a KINDLY STRANGER drove us home (I think).

…taking the bus to and from ballet theater performances, two little girls in stage makeup…eyeshadow and lipstick.

…walking up to the community garden by myself and staying there until dark, living out whatever little fantasy game I was playing: the play structure is a ship, or the sand is hot lava, or the basketball court is the Land of the Lost fog pit.

Sometimes my sister (four years older) was with me, but often enough I was alone or with friends my age. We weren’t stupid. If we sensed a car slowing near us we’d ignore it and walk faster and start looking for an adult. Once or twice some random man on the street exposed himself. But, you know, I’m not scarred or anything. It wasn’t like the world was safe and children weren’t being molested and cars weren’t running over people. I was semi-sort of beat up a couple of times on the bus. And I do understand that a city is different from the burbs—with more people on foot and using public transport, you get the panopticon effect (thank you, E. Lockhart, for teaching me a new word!).

In Stead’s article, she quotes Susan Linn: “…these ['tween'] years are a time of great intellectual and creative flowering.” I so buy that. I read more books between the ages of 8 and 12 than I’ve read in the last 20 years, I bet. My imagination was at its very ripest and I distinctly remember that the times I most richly explored it were when I was free from adult supervision or peer judgment. The era, and my mom, gave me the freedom and independence to explore it, and without that I doubt I’d be a writer.

All of this is one of the many reasons I so enjoyed When You Reach Me. Reading it made me feel like I did on those days living my independent little life in the city.

If I had kids I would totally read this book by Lenore Skenazy:

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But I don’t, so you should.