Missing: Reason

Sixth grade could barely hold me and my parents had to feel lucky we only lived a block from my elementary school. I was an adventured-minded skinny kid and probably should've gotten in a lot more trouble than I ever did.

There were a couple of routes to school for me. Both led into a large field/playground that backed up to my neighborhood. Earlier in the year I had started taking the longer way. My dog Dragon had developed doggie diabetes, gone blind, and eventually deteriorated so badly that my parents were forced to put him out of his misery. I needed good cry on that last morning of Dragon's life and the long way around give me a chance to get it out of my system before trudging to class.

I found I actually preferred the longer path. It gave me more of chance to talk to my buddies as we walked home in the afternoons. It became part of the routine. Everything along that path usually stayed the same.

On one sunny afternoon, Gary and I made the trip and ran smack dab into something unsettling. A van, sitting at the end of the road, right along our path. We knew it didn't belong there. That wasn't nearly as discomforting as the blacked-out windows and the words "Shy Guy" written in airbrush scrawl along one of the doors. If my parents could've drawn me a picture of "trouble," it would've looked just like that van.

We scooted past as quickly as we could, not thinking much about the fact that Gary's little brother probably wasn't far behind us. We thought much more about it later when his brother ran home crying. Someone in that van had tried to get him to go behind those tinted windows. The van was gone when our parents went looking for it. We never saw it again.

Though my parents never talked much about that incident, they did ratchet up the rhetoric when a man suspected of having some child molestation issues moved onto our street. We had already established family secret code words and protectionism took on whole new meaning.

No one ever disappeared, though. No one was ever molested. The hackneyed "parent's worst nightmare" never came to pass.

And if it had, I bet you a buck and bag of Butterfinger BB's that the national media wouldn't have shown up.

There is a debate percolating in media circles now about the amount of attention some news outlets are giving to the case of the missing Utah girl, Elizabeth Smart. It's the same debate that popped up around the time of the Jon Benet Ramsey debacle. They're both rich kids who aren't around anymore. Oh, yeah...and they're white as the snow of their home states.

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