I understand that my house full of teens and tweens long ago outgrew McGruff the Crime Dog. There really is no brave trench-coated canine lurking behind the neighbor’s bushes to ensure that they safely get home from school. God knows, I wish there were.
I don’t know which was more disturbing in the item in Thursday’s paper this week: that police broke up an alleged marijuana operation at an apartment house overlooking the James F. Doughty middle school, or that one of the residents living there was charged with failing to comply with sex offender registry requirements.
Michael Perrotti, 36, was charged with aggravated trafficking and cultivation of marijuana, A few others who either lived or hung out there also were summoned for a few things such as drug possession and possession of drug paraphernalia.
One of those charged with possession of drug paraphernalia was 33-year-old Aaron Robshaw, who has a conviction or two for sexually abusing minors.
It’s enough to make your skin crawl as you watch the hundreds of 10- to 14-year-olds file by that front door each day.
What’s going on behind the front doors they pass each day on the way to and from school is not normally what’s on the minds of middle schoolers. More often it’s who’s getting bopped upside the head by a snowball, who’s flirting with whose boyfriend and, occasionally, albeit very occasionally, language arts homework.
But one also would suspect that somewhere in that gangly, moody bunch of hormones that trudge up that sidewalk every day there were one or two kids who knew exactly what was going on inside the first-floor apartment at 72 Pier St.
Tossing a convicted sex offender into a pot-dealing mix makes it that much scarier. It’s not necessarily the temptation of a cupcake or a woeful tale of a lost puppy that can be used to lure some in this age group into the middle of a nightmare.
Of course, Pier Street or the surrounding area is not unusual. Kids grow up. They take walks. There are frightening things going on behind a lot of doors in every town and city and each day our children walk right past them.
By the time they hit the middle school years, long gone is our ability to hold their hand and walk them to and from school. We entrust them to their peers, hoping that in their overgrown, overmuddled, overstimulated and yes, oversexed minds that they still can help to keep one another safe.
They don’t have to hold hands with a buddy when they go to the restroom anymore, but as parents we can hope the buddy is still nearby.