Children on the Side of Milk Cartons

By Jann Segal

She ran as fast as she could after the black car stopped on the side of the busy street on that sunny summer day, and four adult strangers opened their doors and invited her inside. Her mother had  always warned her  to run from strange men if that ever happened. But two men were in the front and two women in the back, egging her to enter the car. She had heard about the darkness of bad men. But were there bad women too?

This stroll down the street was an independent interlude for her. At thirteen years old, she had joined her mother at the hair salon to meet her mother’s hairdresser who had a talented niece with a great voice. They thought perhaps the two could form an adolescent duet, which they did for several years. As she kept running and trying to figure out what to do and if she could run across the even busier cross street and back to the safety of her mother and the hair salon, she had no idea that she would eventually, and not that long into the future, become so fluent with intricate and complex guitar stylings, that she would be good enough to consider becoming a professional session musician. But on this day, and in that circumstance, all she knew was that she wanted to find safety and hoped the streetlight timing was on her side. She hoped nobody was following her and was afraid to look behind. She just kept running.

What she also didn’t know, was that even as she made it across the busy cross street after having waited for the light to turn green, that she would forget this moment in time, only to remember it in detail, then forget about it again for decades. An essay by writer Joan Didion that she read decades later, brought the repressed memory back in full force, only to disappear yet again. Then about twenty-five years after that, it re-emerged. That re-emergence was a profoundly emotional dissonance for her with notes that lingered until she was able to bury it.  She was to learn in her professional working years that three women, abducted at a similar age by their school bus driver in Cleveland, were discovered after living in the darkness of his captivity for a decade in a neighborhood she had recently visited on business. Even the neighborhood as shown on the news, has homes she had passed while on a that trip. She cried for days as she heard the news and felt the guilt. The little girl inside her, the one that had run away in daylight from a looming danger all those years ago, felt guilty for not being able to help them, and for learning she had been unknowingly so nearby.

But of course, the rational adult that she was understood that once abducted, there is often nothing any adult can do to save the child. Her eight-hour visit to the nearby Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which she absorbed like a sponge while in Cleveland, a way to avoid the darkness of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, fed the light of her inner musician, the musician that never left her even after she had put the instrument down.  Her day illuminated by the history of music was such a counterpoint to the darkness that she was trying to ignore on 9/11, and the horror that was gong  on in Cleveland’s suburbs. Yet what she learned about the incident with the girls was an intermezzo of the memory that ultimately tuned and sharpened with polished clarity the little girl’s remembrances from the journey she had run away from her entire life.

She always knew as an adult that when a car innocently stopped near a curb or slowed down as she walked by in any of the Los Angeles neighborhoods that were comfortable and native to her, she would speed up her walking. She never knew why. She also never understood why, in a shopping mall or movie theater, she kept an eye out for children who might have been temporarily disconnected from their parents and even tried to unite them in a friendly, non-threatening way. She didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Yet this was her weakness, an undisclosed part of herself; one she could never articulate or understand. She who always had an unwavering, complete, and accurate memory. One who believed she had complete knowledge of herself.

For we all keep things hidden, even from ourselves, secrets we dare not share or even think about. We harbor deep secrets we keep from others who meet us and try to befriend us. How can we ever get to know people really, since we all have an inner child who has run from someone or something? A darkness that gets blanched if we are lucky; a stab at forgetfulness that might come back to haunt not just us, but someone who accidently says something to restore the promise that these moments of fear, panic, and uncertainty will return.   But the children whose pictures we used to see on the sides of milk cartons with the caption, “Have you seen me?” had their own secrets once, then no more. They didn’t get to run away. Instead, they have passed a painful inheritance to their parents. An inheritance that went in the wrong direction, against the natural order of things, and which generates a guaranteed and undeniable silent, hidden, dark, secret grief.

There was nothing uncertain, ambiguous, or vague in her movements to return to the well-lit hair salon. She was a highly focused child trying to straddle an adult world for the first time by simply walking down a busy street alone during the light of day. A child with a memory that could later in life remember details so minute her mind recorded days of the week and the time of the day for many events in life. Except for this one. But when the memories resurfaced, the sharps and flats of the day couldn’t have been more clearly recorded: the toy she had in her hand, a key chain with a plastic root beer float attached to the chain; the yellow, gold, and white floral printed outfit she was wearing that day, with gold plastic buttons down the back of the top, and matching shorts.  The same outfit she wore the prior long hot summer of racial unrest during the Los Angeles riots. Yet this summer, the unrest lay within her until she made her way back to safety. And then as if by protective magic, the clarity of that day left her so she could go on and live a normal life. Or did she?

Light can enter a life in so many ways. And so can a dissonant chord. A momentary encounter with a brief but escapable darkness  - escapable even in the mind, but only for a while perhaps  -  brings with it not only a sense of balance, but a sense of fear. A small taste of a larger drama that never played itself out.

Yet what we hide creates not just an outer scab, but a shell. Sometimes an impenetrable shell, a mask, that can fracture every relationship, change every mood, dictate tastes that spring from our emotions, such as art and music.  We all face the eternal struggle between light and darkness in one form or another. One never knows what lies hiding in the darkness. Does the evil that created the need for the campaign to find children on the side of milk cartons exist in a vacuum, or can we more readily identify it because of our own light?