Seems Like Old Times

I was rolling my bike up the driveway to park it in our basement when I looked up and saw, past the garage, a pair of young men I did not recognize. At first I pushed it to the side, assuming that they were acquaintances of my son who was surely nearby, waiting to swoop in and bombard them with Nerf darts. Upon closer examination, a few steps closer to the gate to the back yard, I ascertained that these boys were much younger than my son, and I didn't see or hear him. Or my dog. I opened the door to the basement as I continued to ponder this disjoint. When I came out, they were gone. I was out of practice.
When we first moved into our house, we were pioneers. Our front and back yards had been the frontier for the neighborhood kids for some time. They climbed the trees. They played baseball. They pulled the fruit from the branches, ate some, and hurled the rest at whom or whatever they chose. They hung out. The fact that they would do this at any time of the day or night was a challenge to my new little family, who simply wanted to establish their patterns and territory in this new place. One night I laid in wait for a pair of boys who were after the apples in our back yard. I hid behind the garage and waited for them to come over the fence before I surprised them and caught one of them as he was coming down out of the tree. Then I marched him back out the front gate, down the sidewalk, and up the stairs to his the apartment he shared with his father.
I remembered all of this as I made my way inside the house where I was met by my son and his friend, breathless in anticipation of telling me that "there are kids in the yard and we didn't invite them." I recalled the basic patterns of egress for boys in our yard, and walked to our bedroom, where I threw open the window and spotted the trespassers scurrying along the other side of our fence in an attempt to escape to the street. I knew that they were about to run into a locked gate, so I watched them for a moment. They looked to be about eight or nine years old, about the same age as the kids I had once chased out of our apple tree. "Good afternoon, boys," I called down to them.
They stopped dead in their tracks. They had nowhere else to go. I had the high ground. "Uh, hi," they winced.
"I'm Mister Caven. Did you want to come and play in our yard?"
I watched as the two of them worked silently on an excuse or alibi, but to my growing satisfaction, shame gripped them tight. They said nothing. I asked them their names. "I'm Frankie, and this is Johnny."
Really? "Where do you live?" I asked, not sure if I should believe anything they might say.
"In the apartments down the street." Or maybe they were going to simply confess. This was turning out to be much easier than I remembered.
I launched into a lecture that I hadn't used in more than ten years. I told them about how all our friends and neighbors came to our front door and knocked when they wanted to play in our yard. I told them that when people hop our fences without saying hello first, we might think they weren't our friends.
"That we were criminals," said Johnny, showing off his vocabulary and his sense of the justice system.
"Would you guys like to come in and play in our back yard?" I asked again from my lofty perch.
They nodded.
"Well then, hop over that fence, go out to the street and come in our front gate. Knock on the front door and you can meet my son, his friend, and our dog."
Johnny looked up with wide eyes. "You have a dog?"
"Oh don't worry," I assured him, "she's a nice dog. She doesn't bite." I waited for the prescribed beat, just like the old days, "Unless we tell her to."
In the end, Frankie and Johnny came in and were welcomed to our back yard with its swing and trees to climb and the clubhouse to examine. They stayed for half an hour or so, probably much less time than they might have stayed if they had sneaked in. And that's what I remembered best. Once they've been invited, it's just not that fun anymore.