Goodnight, Adam.

This morning, when I turned on my computer and saw this, a still-open era from my childhood finally ended. 

Adam Walsh would have been 33 today.  But when he was six, he became not just a headline, but a pop culture icon to my friends and me.  He embodied our first encounter with real fear — fear with tinted windows and slow-creeping tires instead of fangs; fear that didn’t lurk under our beds.  It couldn’t fit there.

I remember the eerie silence in Mrs. Gallagher’s second grade classroom, the morning after Adam: His Song Continues aired on television.  My mother, like many others, had made the conscious decision to punch an irreparable hole in the shelter she’d constructed so carefully around me and let me watch the movie.  She sat with me on the den couch the whole time, just to make sure I didn’t miss the details:

He was out of his mother’s eyesight for just a moment.  She never saw him again.  They only found his head.  He was a little boy, just about your age.  He was out of his mother’s eyesight for just a moment.       

I’ve never feared anything as much as I feared whatever it was that took Adam Walsh off the face of the earth.  And I grew up, watching Adam’s father, John Walsh, keep up a tireless crusade over the airwaves.  He grew grayer; the picture of his son did not. 

It wasn’t until this morning, though, that I realized what a great gift Adam gave me.  I’m not talking about the progressive work in the field of child endangerment prevention headed by his parents, though those have been nothing short of extraordinary.  (Few people are aware that John and Reve Walsh actually founded the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  They put those faces on the milk cartons, even as they knew that the one they so desparately wanted to see again wasn’t coming home.) 

Adam Walsh taught me the profound utility of fear.  It’s a bittersweet lesson, no doubt.  I looked at his little face, on the little league baseball card the news stations always chose to, and I felt the first stirrings of real anger.  Fury, almost.  Another grown-up emotion that some adults would have said was as innappropriate for me as the viewing of Adam’s movie. 

But in ever-magnifying waves of hot, hive-inducing, eight-year-old nerve, I also felt a deep sense of unity with my classmates.  We were all on the same side — the right side — of something important.  We wanted that thing that took Adam to be gone forever, and a little watch light came on in the backs of our minds.  It wouldn’t come near us, or we’d scream.  It wouldn’t come near our friends, or we’d hit it so hard it didn’t come near anyone again.  We spent the morning after Adam bombarding Mrs. Gallagher with graphic accounts of our plans to annihilate the Strangers of the world, and Adam’s Stranger in particular.  We’d see him and we’d get him.  Anytime, now…anytime, now…

Well, now I’m 30.  And today I finally got to call my mother — the one who showed me the movie and lit the little light — and tell her it was over.  They got him.  Oddly enough, I didn’t feel that little watch light go out. 

Somewhere in southern Florida, a burial is being planned for a child whose remains have been in an evidence locker for almost three decades.  And a few states north, here I sit, more aware, more courageous, more intensely alive than I would have been, but for his death. 

I watch out for myself.  I watch out for others.  I am afraid.  And in that fear, hell had better watch out, because I’m dangerous. 

Goodnight, Adam.  You rest.  Mrs. Gallagher’s class and I can take it from here. 

   

 

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