Stranger Things

If you’re a community newspaper reporter as I was in the mid-1990s you covered school board meetings on the special ed budget and zoning commission meetings on whether the town ought to approve a new mental health facility (which sadly they did not) and, on days like Halloween, you took your Olympus Wide 35 millimeter camera as I did to go capture the trick or treaters. I went around the Swampscott Massachusetts neighborhood at dusk and tried to interview and photograph a gaggle of kids about their costumes, but the picture was interrupted when a couple of them screamed as I approached and ran away. The next morning was a Wednesday – and if you’re a community reporter like I was, you visited the police station to get a copy of the police log. I had to write a column chronicling the most interesting and bizarre police encounters from the week. Not 2 seconds after I walked into the captain’s office did I hear it: “Cote! What in the world did you do last night? You’re supposed to write about the police log, not be in it!” Apparently, the mom of those two girls had called the station complaining about a strange, shorter man with a camera trying to take the kids’ pictures. My editor had me write a public apology in the paper. I was at least given a chance to talk about how kids of my generation didn’t grow up in this tense nervousness about strangers. I remember that week like it was yesterday and I think about that town and my time there as the roots of a career as a journalist, and the roots of the mental health crisis in America today – the start of overprotective parenting, the skepticism around a mental health facility as a threat not a solution, and the sad reality that we all just started to teach our kids not to talk to strangers. If you ask my kids, I’m more comfortable talking to strangers than to my own family—at a diner, on the subway, crossing an intersection, and in line at Dunkin. “Dad, do you have to talk to everyone you don’t know,” my son Tommy says. “Yes - it’s called humanity, and I can’t help it,” I said. Even if it sometimes gets me in trouble…