I think that you probably remember as I do, with crystal clarity, the feeling of going to the mall, with a pal or even alone, and bumming around.  Bumming around just meant walking longingly through Forenza and Esprit stores, fondling the odd shirt or cable knit sweater, laughing hysterically at the dirty posters at spencer gifts...  Never buying anything except maybe a thing of fries at the food court.  It was a gift of freedom.

And we were dropped off and picked up later.  There were no cell phones and no internet and the pay phones were slime coated and cost a dime but worked to call if no one came to pick you up.  I hate to say this but I am pretty sure that there were evil and gross people at the mall back then - murderers and sex offenders and all sort of stuff from the Group W Bench.  It wasn't really top of mind though -  we weren't scared and we did fine figuring out how to manage our days and nights at the mall.

Today I am taking my son to the mall with his friends for his birthday.  And before our departure I am sitting here planning how much freedom exactly they can handle.  It's a big mall.  Full of strangers who are  likely felons.  Maybe not but it's a free country and anyone can go to the mall.  And while he has a cell phone I am suddenly unsure about his stranger danger alert system and if it will really function when needed.

I know that I'm not the only person who is bewildered that in just one generation we have become so afraid of the unknown that we can't let a kid walk around an enclosed space - even one that has actual cops riding around on wheeled patrol.

Once I posed a question on Facebook to see if people thought my daughter, 10 at the time, was old enough to walk our dog in the park.  I got something like 64 comments, most questioning my sanity at even broaching the idea.  So, in turn I questioned my own sanity and decided that it was a broken relic of a rural upbringing - a sanity that could be useful in some other decade, in some less urban setting.  Could it be this same ancient fading sanity that drives me to think that my kids who can't handle a dog walk can handle a whole mean mall?

But wait... my kids, at the least the tweens and teens among them, are responsible and serious people.  They can make good choices, and they have the basic fitness to run from any stray murderers loose in the mall when needed. And I have to man up and let them try it out because I guess that in the end they have to be out in this crazy world sometime.  They have to learn how to pick good friends, talk to the right strangers,  be cautious about their surroundings.  They have to have a few risks and experiences under their belts sometime before they need date rape prevention nail polish and sex offender internet searches - days which sadly aren't far off.

So there is no time like the present to kick it off -  bumming at the mall -  with some far more cool and hip nomenclature.  I'll just keep my phone in my hand and be sitting at the emergency location, you know, just in case.