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Boobaby and I were walking home from the park with Cry it Out Mike and his little girl the other day when a San Francisco Lady remarked on how cute the girls were. Maybe you don’t know the San Francisco Lady type? Briefly, she had bright pink hair (roots well exposed), multiple piercings, and a pit bull and a schnauzer that were “walking each other”–that is to say, they were connected together by a short length of studded leather leash. Hmm.

And she said, about my 18-month old daughter:

“Awww, she’s so cute! You’d better watch out or you’ll see her on a milk carton someday!”

What a weird, creepy thing to say. And like most weird, creepy things that happen to me during the course of my urban existence, I would normally have written it off. Except I was walking with a blogging buddy, so I immediately said, “Wow, are you going to blog that, or am I?”

So here I am, blogging it, and I still am clueless about why someone would say something so horrible. Just to be horrible, I suppose, or perhaps–and this is how I choose to see it–to be “different.” Iconoclasm is a virtue among many in San Francisco. Anyone who lives and works here has plenty of stories about oddball types, but they take on a different dimension when you’re responsible for the well-being of your baby.

Being an urban stay-at-home dad, I’ve had to respond to a fair number of these spooky strangers. I won’t say that my responses are the best, and there’s a lot to be said for simply avoiding confrontation. But, for better or worse, here are the most common:

• Bad drivers are a thorn for any urban pedestrian, but they rankle even more when you’re pushing an infant in front of you in a stroller. At least once a week, a driver cuts way too close to me and Boobaby. My strategy is to make eye contact before I enter an intersection and assert our rights firmly. If a car violates our right-of-way, I yell something (profanity-free, of course); I consider my yell the equivalent of a car horn. Once, I even yelled so loudly that a cop heard and gave the driver a ticket. Justice!

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• We sometimes get adults without kids at the playground. San Francisco playgrounds are usually fenced and have a “no unaccompanied adult” rule. Nonetheless, an occasional outsider will come in to use the water fountain or sit on a bench. Mostly, I just keep an eye on these folks, but if any start to act oddly (or too nicely) toward the kids, I’m quick to ask them to leave, or to just call the cops.

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• In the same vein, our playground is sometimes visited by teenagers for whom it was not designed, which is only a problem when they “take over”: run or ride bikes around, jump from the tops of structures or swings, and generally endanger the toddlers with their physical prowess. My oh-so-clever response is to engage them in play with my baby! A couple of rounds of catch with Boobaby is usually enough to bore any teenager into finding a cooler hangout.

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• Finally, we get a lot tourists here, and many like taking pictures of kids in the playground, usually without asking. Now, that’s generally legal in public places in the U.S., but sort of tacky, given all the weirdness out there. My response? Personally, I don’t mind actual tourists taking photos (especially if they ask first), but if something about the photographer seems off, or if one of the moms at the playground gets uncomfortable, I’ll politely ask him or her to stop. Sometimes, they’ll even politely agree! If they don’t, I just screw up the shot by standing in the way.

That’s the worst of the worst, and I should reassure you that even here in the big city nearly everyone is just as enchanted with Boobaby as you’d expect in any tightly-knit small town. Moreover, I do truly feel that Boo gets benefits from seeing different sorts of people around her: nearly from birth, she’s seen a world that is much larger than her immediate family and caregivers.

I have to believe that even meeting an occasional creepy person is worth that, and even seeing the oddballs will prepare her to understand and even love the breadth of humanity she’ll encounter off in the world someday.

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[tags]kids, parents, children, stranger danger, weird behavior, scary, odd, safety concerns[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by obeck, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved