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    latch.key \’lach-,ke\ n  1 : a key to an outside and esp. a front door.
                                             -- [Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1979]

Latchkey kid -- A terminology adopted from the term latchkey, labeled the children returning from school to an empty house.  It was the late seventies, and inflation climbed as Jimmy Carter held the Presidential Office of the United States of America.  This increase of needed funds for a household enabled both parents of families to return to the work force.  A key, or set of keys, usually dangled from the homemade necklaces from these kids, which enabled them to enter their houses after school.

Growing up in Brooklyn in the late seventies and early eighties supplied me with a lot of freedom to decide what I wanted to do with my leisure time.  When I entered the three-bedroom apartment, the first thing I always noticed was the ten dollars that my mother would leave me on the kitchen table.  Often times, this money was used for an afternoon snack and some video games.  I did not realize until later in life that dinner was usually served in early evening instead of nine-thirty post meridiem.  My parents would return from their business daily at approximately eight forty-five every night.  Pretty soon after that time, the kitchen would be filled with the smell of home cooking:  A smell that unbeknownst to me, I would one day yearn for.

I usually tarried around with a few friends after school who were in the same parental condition I was in.  We felt this was a blessing in disguise and felt sorrow for the other kids whose mothers stayed at home.  These other kids never were able to experience what we did.  They never had the freedom to.  We became masters of our own environments and emotional upbringings.  Whether this was any good or not, I never discovered the answer one way or the other.  In some ways we matured expediently, and in other ways, we never grew.  The most important aspect that I have learned is that there is good and bad in everything.

 
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