Why I didn't run away

       In 1992 there was a Fleet bank halfway between my best friend’s house and my own.  At least, we gauged it as halfway in our 7 year mind. Having driven it now as an adult I’d gauge it at closer to 20/80 my house being 80% of the distance.  My house was farther from everything. We lived an hour from the school my dad worked at and thus at least 15 miles from even our nearest friends.  

After a hard week of second grade mileage was of little import to us. We were suppose to meet at this bank at midnight on a Wednesday.  That way, our parents wouldn’t notice we were gone until at least 5 or 6am.  We both felt we had plenty of reason to run away. Her parents were strict, mine were stricter.  We were never allowed as many sleepovers as we wanted.  We were, to quote The Little Mermaid, “bright young women, stuck a swimming ready to stand!”

There was no definite plan of where we’d go after the bank.  The bank was a key part of the plan because I knew my grandmother had a savings account in my name there.  I not yet learned, that the term “banker’s hours” did not in fact mean any old time of the day, especially midnight and more especially before ATMs were invented.  There were other things we had not considered such as eating, beyond perhaps bringing Dunkaroos as snacks. Not to mention, our total oblivion to the issues of safety, legality and just plain exhaustion.

And yet, it was not any of these things that kept me from running away.  Yes, when the night approached I was scared, a little of the dark, a little of finding my way across two towns but most importantly I was terrified by the prospect of never seeing my family again.  

In my egocentric child mind I had imagined how sorry they would be that I was gone.  How much they would miss all my help. But the truth was, I would have been so sorry if I had set even one foot out the door.  

I tried to put it into words for my best friend when we sheepishly saw each other at school the next day was, “You know we always have plenty of time for adventures somewhere else, what if something exciting happens right here and we miss it.” 

She nodded slowly, “Yeah, we can try again next year or over the summer if we want to.”  And eventually we did leave home, but no matter how hard things got over the next ten years, and I’m sorry to say we faced many tragedies far greater than those of second grade, we never ran away and we did have many epic adventures.