Regardless of how old we are or what era we grew up in, we all would like to be more trusting than we really should be.

This fall, Michelle and I took a quick trip up north and had a blast. The place we stayed at was a fairly small community, and we asked a local once what the crime rate was like there.  He told us most people never worried about locking doors or getting anything stolen: it just didn’t happen much.  

So, there are still places like that out there. We were amazed, actually.

We know some folks, quite well, who said I could write about them in my column as long as I protected the innocent, which I will.

Basically, these folks moved to a very small town after living a long time in a larger city, and decided to live a quieter life in a sleepy little bedroom community where things were of a slower pace and life was simpler.

This was a place where every person they ran into was extremely trusting and friendly. The mail carriers stopped and talked. Neighbors came over on the day they moved and welcomed them to the neighborhood.  

Although they were still locked up at night, they gradually became more and more trusting in their new community. At one point, a car that was sometimes parked on the road in front of their house was left unlocked. Furthermore, a spare key was hidden deep within the car’s console.

And guess what? The car was stolen.

During the wee hours of the morning, a crime spree led by a group of thugs from far away swept through the little town, finding cars and garages unlocked, swiping whatever they could and in this case, taking the car on quite a joy ride. The folks who lost their car ended up doing OK in the end, but it was a hard lesson to learn.

It’s amazing to me when I have heard of some of the “doorbell” camera stories people tell. One family found they had an evening visitor for several nights in a row when they watched the footage from their camera. Apparently, an inebriated neighbor would get pretty sauced every evening in the garage a few doors down, and then wander around yards in the darkest hours of night. This particular footage caught the wanderer sitting on their porch, moving potted plants around, and peering into vehicles parked on the driveway. 

Now, in this case, nothing was taken or disturbed, but one never knows what else could take place.

I remember being a kid and being in the car when my parents would run inside a business to get something quickly, leaving the car keys in the ignition and the car running.  We didn’t “play with the gearshift,” as we were constantly reminded not to, nor did we think about anyone jumping in and stealing the car. We sometimes walked about a mile and a half home from school, never thinking once about getting snatched off the street.

But then I realized this was four decades ago. I need to face reality.

I would love to see what kids growing up in the 1940s could say about these topics. Did they ever think that any adult wasn’t trustworthy? Did they leave their cars and houses unlocked? What appalled them about crime that took place in the 1980s?

One of our neighbors, a native of Kentucky, was talking out in the yard one day about another car theft we’d heard about from a few subdivisions close by.  

“Shoot, where I come from, we often leave our keys in the truck in case someone needs to borrow it for a little while.”

If only that were the norm.

Even when I was a young teacher in the early 1990s, the town in which I taught was still small enough that things were a lot simpler. I lived around the block from the school and once walked with a group of students, around 12 or so, to my apartment with sack lunches. We sat on my living room floor and watched cartoons while we ate our lunches. The kids were thrilled to see my bachelor pad, and since the mini-field trip (an incentive) was approved by both the principal and parents, no one raised an eyebrow.  

Nowadays, a trip like that would be frowned upon, and I certainly wouldn’t even consider it.

I also remember being the drama club advisor in the 1990s  and needing to haul some furniture we were going to use on stage.  The maintenance supervisor, when I told him what I needed, told me to just borrow the old maintenance pickup truck out back, as it “always had keys in it.”

In the few years that I served as advisor, I often went out back and jumped in that old truck, hauled some props or scenery, and parked the truck with keys in it back behind the school.  No one ever said a word or cared.

So yeah, times have changed. I’m wondering why. The breakdown of the family? Lack of respect for the law?  Inflation?  A deterioration of morals? 

Whatever the reasons, it’s disappointing.