My little Dude

So I debated about sharing this experience publicly but in the end I felt I needed to. Okay, here goes. The other week, I stepped out my door to go out to get the mail. I spotted a baby walking down the street. Hesitating for a moment or two, I watched in fascination as the child crossed the intersection and kept meandering down the middle of the street. Don’t ask why it took me so long to realize the kid was alone. Or why I was so slow to act. But thankfully, there wasn’t a single car on the road. However, the baby was now in front of my house and headed for a very busy intersection. Racing to catch up to him, I, and a few other neighbors, managed to get him wrangled before any harm was done. Somehow, I was the one who ended up taking him home. I guess it was by default since I was the only woman in the group of rescuers. Fine, I called the police and waited for them to arrive. The little guy was filthy, hot and looked exhausted. I had no idea how far he’d walked but I don’t imagine it was much farther than I had watched since he seemed to be about 2 years old. After giving him some water, I tried to get him to talk to me. Nothing doing. A very nice policeman arrived and asked a ton of questions. Little guy wasn’t talking to him either. After giving him a toy, the policeman asked me if I was okay with playing with the child to try to get him relaxed enough to talk to me. In the meantime, officers were going to start going door to door to see if they could figure out who the kid was since no one had reported a missing child. Something like 30 minutes later, the kid finally starts talking. His name, “Dude”. Seriously? No one every called him anything better than that? And either “Mama said bye-bye” or Mama went bye-bye”, hard to tell with a child that age. Either way, yikes, sounds like the kid got left home alone. Finally, the officer comes back and takes the kid. This was after over 45 minutes of him being in my home and according to the officer, still no one had reported a missing kid. Now, I don’t know the end of the story. What I do know is how sad that little guy looked as he was peeping at me over the officer’s shoulder as they walked down my drive. Trust me, my heart was breaking because I was fairly sure I’d shown the child more love in less than an hour than he’d had in his whole life. So hear me and hear me good. Children are not plants you can feed and water occasionally and hope for the best. There are a lot of things wrong in this country – big issues that need to be addressed – but no one seems to be tackling the fundamentals. And if you don’t know what those are, I’m sorry for you. But this little guy is one of those fundamentals. Save him and you'll save the world...