My son came down the stairs, way past his bedtime, and told my wife and me he couldn’t sleep because he was worried about his friend Rich. I asked him what was the matter with Rich, and he told me, “Richard can’t go to the store any kind of way he wants to anymore, and he’s not sure he wants to go to summer school ’cause he has to take all kinds of different routes to get around ’cause, you know, the gangs are after him.”
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My wife stood up from her seat on the piano bench. You could see she’d flared up like a freshly lit match, and she said, “Well, it’s too bad, but this time we should do something about it. Yeah. It’s about time we did something. I think we should start our own gang, a gang of parents. We’ll wear our hats cocked to the side too, and wear earrings anyplace we want to, and then go to where these gangbangers think they own the block and we’ll come up on them and show them what they had for breakfast.”
“Then another boy–he was Folks, too–hit Rich on the back, so I jumped in and told them, ‘Fair is fair. Let them fight one-on-one.’ But they didn’t listen to me. Another Folks picked up a bottle and I had to wrestle it away from him before he hit Rich with it, and then I helped Rich break loose, but one of the boys hit him on the head with something he was carrying and it knocked Rich down. Then they all ran off.”
