I am at home making popcorn and roasted chestnuts to bring to the cinema
when someone knocks at the door. One only comes knocking at the wolf’s door
when he is hungry!
The neighbour’s kid asks in the softest candid but fake voice: ‘would you like to
sponsor me?’
‘Sponsor you to what?’ I ask. ‘Moving out? I've sponsored you last year
and you said you would come back with the raffle tickets but you never did and
you took my money.’
The kid blushed and left..
I didn't want to sound mean but there are kids and kids and these ones are an absolute nightmare, they respect no one, knock down my plants in the yard and their ball constantly hits the walls and windows even if they have been advised a million times by the management company that they shouldn't be playing in the communal areas. They disturb my group meditations by shouting insults and constantly scream in the corridors. Yes, they are this bad!
That made me think about my own childhood and how things were so different, the memories of running in the fields, playing with the cats and dogs and the other neighbours kids. There was never an accident as the cars would drive slowing in a street were kids played. With hardly any vigilance we had fun for hours and when it came the time to return home our mums would call. One by one, the kids would be called back home shortly before dinner time to wash up. My neighbour had a parrot that perfectly reproduced the sound of her mum’s voice so she would always be home before us. We respected authority; anyone older than us would make an authoritarian figure to be respected.
It no longer works like this today. The kids and adolescents I see around Dublin behave like arrogant pricks and have become quite threatening to adults when in groups.
In a way I feel sorry for them as childhood seems to have lost time, space, innocence and safety, not to mention how increasingly fat and unhealthy a large percentage of them has become. Is this real progress?
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