Yes…..no, wait upon childhood memory reflection I mean No.
I agreed first in like this adamant way….and then I remembered living on Staten Island and wanting to go to the artsy cinema to see Gallipoli with Mel Gibson about the Australian World War 1 involvement, God I was weird. My mother just looked at me. But I had my allowance money so she shrugged and called a cab and the cab took me t the theater where she’d called the theater, I paid for my ticket, saw the movie and then waited at the Optimo store, I remember looking at the paperbacks and buying candy, next door until my call back to her and she sent another cab to pick me up. Not an hour but maybe 15 minutes each way.
I’m thinking though when your pre-teen insists on using the money from their small business enterprise to go see a foreign film at the faraway theater you weigh as a parent telling them all the rules of strangers against the fact that if your kid is this weird, a stranger will return them.
Then a few years later my mother was in a leg cast, having been hit by a car….driven by my father. It was an accident. We’re all going to just settle on it was an accident. Anywho someone had to go get lobster dinner and hair supplies for her to do her hair so she would stuff a $50 in my underwear and then cab me to Fordham Road in the Bronx, to the fish market for steamed lobster platters then next door to the beauty shop for hair supplies—-everyone tracked by notes and pre-phone calls and then I would wait for my appointed cab back.
This was all pre-Uber.
Boy, I was just sent out and about, wasn’t I? I was between 8–13. Maybe it’s different for NYC kids—-I was a latchkey kid, home from school, the key around my neck, no company allowed, had to call—-212–393–69— my mother’s job number, my God I still remember it by 330pm. Sometimes she would put money under the phone and would give me instructions about grocery shopping to have done by the time she got home or she’d tell me to go buy a token and meet her at work—-at least a half an hour train ride away—-we were going out for dinner. My mother could cook, she just didn’t like to so she and my father did a lot of restaurant hopping and as an only child it was cheaper to take me than pay to have someone babysit me.
You know I’m beginning to think that a lot of my childhood where I thought I was being treated as a big boy, as responsible was both servitude and dangerous by non-NY standards.
Ok, three weird points.
I’ve never been in an Uber. I downloaded the APp and then was about to put in my credit card number——but I was on my phone so it doesn’t automatically fill in——and my wallet was you know———-in the other room……..this was about a year ago. I’ll get to it.
Just when you think you have a firm grip on all the ways you were abused as a child someone brings something up that reminds you that what happened, looked at in a different was probably against Child Protective Services guidelines.
A few years ago, I was about 30 years old and going somewhere in Queens. So I was taking a cab from mid-Jamaica to Flushing, I think. The driver asks me did I have a preferred route and I was like no—-like I knew one. Then he asks me did I live in Queens. I say yes. Then he asks had I always lived in Queens. I’m like no, why? Had I lived in the Bronx? I’m like no….well, there was a year when my grandmother was dying that we took care of her that we moved in. Then he says Jerome Avenue by Moshulu Parkway and I’m like….yeah. And he;’s like I remember you!
That mofo remembered driving me somewhere, probably an errand from my mother, 15 years prior to that!
Curiously after undergrad and Tony Robbins, Personal Power my big pie in the sky NYC dream was to drive to and from work in a Corinthian leathered Town Car. A month in, from my new job, I was! Then later on law firms sent me to and fro. My big dream is actually to have a car and driver.
See what passive, odd errand based abuse can do to your children!??!
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@gmail.com
KylePhoenixShow@gmail.com
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