A Few More Moments of Childhood: a Game of Manhunt

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Manhunt Providence Moms Blog
Gaspee boys, circa 1976. photo credit: Mr. Rooney

The voices ring through my open windows. 

Aggressive, shouting, young-man voices. I consider going to the window to see what’s up, but before I do, I hear one of the voices call out, Miller! I realize that the voices belong to my neighbor’s son and his friends, and so I stay put and take advantage of the peace of my own empty house; a glass of La Maldita in one hand, and a TV remote in the other.

A handful of middle school boys are stationed outside the house two doors down. They negotiate rules, bark orders and counter-orders, pause to wrestle for a minute, agree to terms, and take off in different directions, or at least I think this is what it sounds like. Which, in a city neighborhood, means that they take off just down the block, into the side yard and backyard. It sounds like a game of Manhunt. They holler over each other to be heard, calling each other by last names, as young men do.

It’s a cool, late summer evening, just starting to get dark. It’s that time of day when, for generations, kids play games of Hide and Seek and Manhunt and Truth or Dare, and older kids don’t play so much as they hang out, doing cartwheels on front lawns, sitting in coed groups, picking grass and throwing it at each other, hiding in doorways and scaring each other. This is a less common sound in my neighborhood–we don’t have packs of kids who all go to the same school and show up at each other’s houses uninvited. We import the friends from other neighborhoods and towns, and it involves driving and arranging until they are old enough to get themselves around. But now and then, we hear the man-voices of a group of friends as they give in to the urge to be boys for a little bit longer.

I’m taken back to nights just like this, a few summers ago but also just five minutes ago, when JJ and one of his buddies ran through yards and chased each other for hours, with high-powered water guns found in the garage. They alarmed the neighbors with their yelling and annoyed them by sprinting past windows. They were having a throwback moment, playing like little kids, but sounding like men. A few weeks later, these boyhood games ended–eclipsed by an explosion of classes and locker combinations and soccer practices and girls–as they started high school. I’m sure they were not aware (I was only half aware myself) that this was the last summer night when they would be running around like this.

On this night, I’m home alone, not worrying about one of the boys breaking a bone on my watch, or accidentally shooting water into a neighbor’s window. I have a whole new set of worries. This summer, there was no water war. The buddy now has his license, and this summer, they have wheels. They work at soccer camp, they go to the beach, to the movies, to Thayer Street, to friends’ houses. They play pickup soccer games and stumble into mini-golf and plan a Golf Crawl, hitting three mini-golf courses and one 9-hole course in one day. On this night, he has gone to a scary movie with a friend (girlfriend?), and I’m here with a glass of wine and some uninterrupted Netflix. I was happy, but now the man-boys outside have made me wistful and nostalgic.

The scrum at my neighbor’s house breaks up and the group passes by, in the street, on foot and on skateboards, maybe a bike, talking loudly as they go, like a scene from one of so many coming-of-age movies.

I hear an emphatic, That is so gross! before their voices fade and disappear.