Couldn’t help but get in another little dig on T-town. (Not sure that Old Town counts as a downtown.) Of course, my city of four years has no downtown.

Isn’t what you write about — this anxiety — a lot about perception and not necessarily about quantifiable facts — meaning we’ve heard so much about crime rates dropping. Yet I still hear and read people who feel as if that’s not the case. I know someone who is nervous about permitting her teen daughter to walk home from RBV in the afternoon after practice.

Could it be that we are more, uh — trying to not say “paranoid” — sensitive to fears of crime when we are parents (today) than when we were kids? I used to walk or ride to the liquor store at Santa Fe/Bobier to buy baseball cards. I doubt that neighborhood next to Vista High was all that safer back then. Yet that was common practice for us (I lived near Bobier Elementary until age 13.)