Innocence and the OMAR Man.

Yesterday a warm sun lit up a radiant scene, the sky was bright blue, the breeze was mild, even the trees seemed to glow with life. These days I appreciate those things; in my earlier days I took them for granted. I recalled the unnoted wonder of being a child in summer, and I remembered the OMAR Man.


I know I had it good, though I took it for granted then. No one could have grown up more idyllically American than I -- middle-class, mid-20th Century, Midwestern, white, small town, three children, intact family, dad worked at a moderately well-paying job, mom stayed home. Many people had it better than us financially (nationwide, not necessarily local), and I know many had it worse. We always had solid food to eat and decent clothes, summer vacation. We walked to a safe school, and other than the occasional tornado alerts, no natural disasters.


Not paradise of course. Years later that I learned that the father of my friend from across the street beat his wife. I sometimes overheard parental murmurs about paying bills, but I was never involved. One kid at school was from a rundown house with an alcoholic father, the kid was always shabbily dressed and smelled bad. I knew no one with intellectual disabilities, but not because such kids didn’t exist; they were hidden away at home, or worse. I recall my mother telling me that around the time I was born another woman had a child with issues, probably Down Syndrome. The doctor talked the mother into turning the child over to him, and he had it committed to the State Home. The mother never saw the baby again, but I did visit the State Home Years later. It was a 20th Century Bedlam, and I knew that perhaps any one of the people my age wandering those halls could have been that child.


But that was in the future. In my childhood days, we roamed freely, from one house to another and, with permission, far from the neighborhood into the nearby countryside. In decent weather we were outside until the evening meal, then until the streetlights came on. We kids sometimes had issues between us, but at worst they were settled by fistfights, then forgotten, never weapons involved.


Innocence. Perhaps best summed up in the visits of the OMAR man. In those days more than milk was delivered to homes. Bread and pastries, too. Once a week a small truck with OMAR emblazoned on the sides (OMAR was a local bakery dealer) would drive slowly onto our block. One of us would spot its first emergence, and yell out, “The OMAR man!” and we (usually 3 or 4) would swarm to the truck. He would stop, open the back door and we climbed in. We’d sit on the floor, feet dangling, watching him make deliveries. And eating. He would open a loaf of plain white bread, and give us each a slice. Bland, pale bread, something we would never eat at home without slathering it with peanut butter or something. But sitting in the back of the truck, it was almost ambrosia.


Couldn’t happen today. For one thing those delivery trucks are no more. But if they were, liability issues would bar the drivers from letting us onto the truck, much less ride in the back; inventory and delivery times would be better monitored; and, more substantively, the odds are against kids wandering freely outside like that; too much risk, or perhaps too much helicopter parenting. And a driver who got too close to other people’s kids would be at risk of suspicion as a potential child molester.


I don’t know if those days were really safer, or we simply were unwise. Kids no doubt did fall off trucks, some men were molesters, and so on. But not in my innocent world. Things went okay for me, and I miss those days.