A sad anniversary

I know exactly when my world ceased to be a safe place. I was in elementary school.

On March 25, 1975 - 30 years ago yesterday - Sheila and Katherine Lyon, who were 12 and 10, walked from their home in Wheaton (about six miles from where I am sitting typing this) to Wheaton Plaza to look at the Easter displays and have lunch. They never came home.

If you want to know if someone grew up in Montgomery County, mention the Lyon girls. It was almost one word for us - theLyongirls - and it was a word to conjure with. Our parents used it as a tag at the end of directives and requests: Get home before dark - remember the Lyon girls. Don't talk to strangers - remember the Lyon girls. Make sure I know where you are - remember the Lyon girls.

The Lyon girls weren't the first children ever to disappear (and, in fact, not much later the cousin of my friends up the street was kidnapped by her father and missing for several months), but Wheaton is right next to Silver Spring and Wheaton Plaza was one of the three places kids would go to spend their pocket money. I could get there easily on the bus, the same way that I could get to downtown Silver Spring. In fact, the same bus went to both places.

The kids in our neighborhood were allowed a lot of freedom and we wandered around in ways that would give me perpetual acid stomach were I a parent. We played in the woods (and there were lots of woods in Silver Spring), we explored Sligo Creek Park, we walked to Jacks (a neighborhood store, if you count as in your neighborhood a store that is 3/4 of a mile away and across the beltway), we rode our bikes all over, we sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door, we played in the churchyard of the Presbyterian church -- and we were supposed to be home when the streetlights came on.

Our parents largely didn't have a clue as to where we were. We weren't allowed inside each other's houses when no parent was home, a rule that was honored only sporadically. My Mom was the first working mother in the neighborhood because our family's was the first divorce, but ours was only the first of several. By the time the Lyon girls disappeared, houses were empty in the afternoons and we roamed all over the place while our mothers were at work.

But after March 25 the parental version of GPS began. We had to check in. We were not to knock on the doors of strangers houses no matter how badly we needed the bathroom. The stuff every parent enforces now.

Sheila and Katherine's story can be found with a simple Google search. There are school pictures and time-elapsed pictures. The original pictures are frozen mementos of 70s hair and smiles that are changing from baby to adult teeth.

A sad, sad anniversary.