Don’t worry, it’ll be summer soon and you can get back to yelling at kids that cut through your yard.
I have proof that I do not yell at kids crossing my lawn. I bought my house in the Seventies. It has a wide, flat front yard, and I was careful about the grass. But my corner was designated a school bus stop. Each morning in the fall, the boys who were waiting for the bus would take one of those peewee-sized rubber footballs and toss it around on my front yard for ten minutes. My across the street neighbor came to me and said, “Don’t let those kids do that. They’ll tear up your yard.” I said, “Oh, Charlie, don’t worry about it. I’m relying on one of those boys to be my ophthalmologist when I get old.” Fifty years later I needed to have my cataracts removed, and, sure enough, a boy who had been waiting for that same bus removed them, although he had been waiting two or three stops away.
Now, if those kids had come back after school and turned my front yard into a gridiron, that would have been a different matter.
In the Twenties, Gertrude Stein, a leading figure in the Modernist movement in arts and literature, gave this advice to boundary pushing artists and writers: “When you are going too far, it is important to know how far to go.”
The boys with the peewee football understood that principle. The guys in the T shirts don’t.
