Riding bikes outside the driveway was a surefire way to end up as roadkill, and roadkill was a surefire way to catch salmonella or rabies or whatever diseases raccoons carried, which we were to safely assume was every disease. Pools of water deeper than puddles were traps sent from heaven to claim little angels. (“A child can drown in an inch of water,” my mother would often yell. “An inch.”) And don’t even get her started on public parks. Sure, go ahead. Go to the park. Have fun spending the rest of your life cooking meth with the other kids in some guy named Burl’s basement. I bet he won’t make you a birthday lasagna. In retrospect, I think it’s quite possible my mother kept me purposely fat and lazy to make me less attractive to abductors. Go ahead, try stealing my flabby baby boy. Good luck getting him to do shit for you, though. Feeding him alone will cost you a fortune!

And so I grew up thinking every activity was brimming with peril. To Debbie, letting a child onto a trampoline was no less dangerous than arming him with a loaded semiautomatic pistol. A water gun that fired anything more than a sprinkle was the quickest way to lose both eyes. And snow days were not days of glory and amusement, because glory and amusement equaled extremities lost to frostbite. “If the snow is too dangerous for you to go to school in,” she told us, “then it’s definitely too dangerous to play in.”

Now, my mother was by no means a doomsayer who forced us to live in some bunker and bide our time until the nuclear apocalypse burnt us all to hell (though we did stock up on canned goods before Y2K, but that was just common sense). In fact, my mother freely encouraged us to go outside—as long as we stayed within six to ten inches of the front door at all times—and we were given all the trappings of midwestern suburban kid life, like scooters, big wheels, pogo sticks, and skateboards—and we could do anything we wanted with them, as long as anything didn’t include riding, jumping, running, brisk walking, or moving.