could also be an age factor. about a decade younger than me they started picking up and dropping off all the kids from school. the kids wouldn’t (and still won’t, it’s ridiculous) bicycle home from school. i bother my brothers that they need to give their kids more free rein like we had growing up and they say I don’t understand and in truth I don’t, but my sister’s doing it fine so pthbt to them.

i mean, back when i was in school one child would die in some public way each year. in the entire city (size: lower six figures population. for the california bay area that’s just a small city/large town. in retrospect i think our mortality rate was pretty good and that was just the deaths i knew about, which was most of them what with those religious/social-climbing type of parents and a town still small enough if you didn’t directly know everyone with some effort you could indirectly know about a good fifth of the town (at my most famous i had probably 25k fans? okay twenty five thousand people who had heard of me)) they would make a huge deal of it every time anything ever happened, as though it was their first time dealing with death. like shit, i was worried that i, as an 8-year-old, had dealt with more death on the farm than the principal had (who was understandably shaken by the stray dog who had darted in front of a teacher’s car in the parking lot, i was too i will not describe the gore but fuck lady i was keeping it together better i felt like i needed to come up and give her a hug). only here’s the thing, only like one out of six that i recall was a vehicular death. but i think it scarred my generation enough that they didn’t want their kids walking to school by the busy roads the way we did.