INTRO MUSIC
I’m Nora McInerny and it’s going to be okay.
[Audio of boys mumbling and giggling]
I grew up with a lot of autonomy. Honestly maybe not even a lot of autonomy, but a decent amount of freedom. I walked myself and my brother to school after my mom left for work. On weekends, my friends and I would ride our bikes around Minneapolis and mostly obey the one rule my parents had which was DO NOT RIDE BY THE TRAIN TRACKS. Which was sort of connected to another semi-rule, don’t go to the Hub in Richfield. My friend Vanessa and I went to the train tracks one time, just to see what all the fuss was about, and we immediately realized, yep, hmm mmm! Our parents were right, not a place for kids. Let’s leave.
But that was the 90s. And this is the year 2023, and what was fine in the 90s: smoking on airplanes, smoking in Applebees, smoking literally anywhere you wanted…is not okay today. Where kids IN MY DAY — and I am at this age where I can say, in my day — were often left to our own devices, my kids are…on devices. Or at least they want to be. They want to be, every waking moment. Instead, their life is a series of regularly scheduled events, punctuated by moments of spontaneity like the appearance of a family of quail in our backyard, or the neighbors ringing our doorbell and asking the boys to play in the cul de sac. My kids have never, as I have, stolen a canoe from their grandparents’ cabin and spent 8 hours on the lam and on open water without anyone even noticing they were gone.
And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing! I don’t think they should have an unsupervised maritime adventure, I don’t think they should have NO adventures! So when Ralph asked me if he could go on a walk with one of the neighbor kids, and Q asked if he could tag along, and they all looked at me like they were a group of prairie dogs and I was a tourist with a bag of peanuts…I said sure, how far do you wanna go? They wanted to walk…around the block.
And before you laugh, this is a big block. It’s more of a blob than a block, not a square city block, you know, it’s got some curves to it. And they were asking essentially to go for a 15-minute stroll without an adult. Which is not a big deal, but I could tell it was going to be a big deal to them, so I said yes, and off they went.
And every day after, they asked to go for a walk. They would leave, they would wander around, and come back to our yard and hang out.
Nora: Is it just kinda nice to not have your mom walking around with you?
Kids: Yeah, basically, yeah.
And one day, I hear Q, our little one, say to his big brother…wanna go on a trash walk? And I say excuse me? A walk? And they say, a trash walk. You said we could take them. Now, I said they could go on a WALK, I didn’t get a proper name for the walk. But a trash walk is – you know what, honestly, I’m gonna let them explain it.
Kids: Okay, so basically, what a trash walk is, is you’re walking around the block, or just around anywhere, and you get metal [laughs], plastic, or just trash.
Nora: What are some of the best things you’ve found on your walk?
Kids: Uh, we found an arrow, uh some back windshield wipers of a car in their package. A rope! I found a magnet.
The best thing about a trash walk is that you can find something: maybe a set of windshield wipers still in their packaging, that you present to your father like a, a prize. Maybe some rope. Maybe some plastic. And maybe…a little bit of independence.
OUTRO MUSIC
I’m Nora McInerny. And this is It’s Going To Be Okay.
CREDITS
