It was a “click” heard around the world.

Actually the real distance was a suburban block in the mid-’60s, when neighborhood kids bolted pell-mell out the back door at the exact same time every morning, after a bowl of Malt-o-Meal, and mothers closed the doors in unison.

Some locked them, like my mother, during certain days of the week when she claimed to be “washing the floor,” but I think she was watching “All My Children” or maybe lying down in a dark room to get a couple hours of peace, not bothering to remove her apron or girdle or nylon stockings.

“Get outside and stay outside!” was the mother’s rule, and that meant not coming back before dinner, unless you were bleeding profusely or there was a major accident, like the time my friend Jane fell head first off the monkey bars on the school playground, cracked her head open, and kept seeing “wiener dogs” everywhere.

Growing up in the sprawl of new suburbs that continued to multiply after World War II, the neighborhood kids were a melting pot of ethnic and economic diversity. We formed a random pecking order based on meaningless details like who had a dog, who did or didn’t brush their hair in the morning, who knew all the Beatles, their girlfriend’s names and the B side of their latest single, who had a basket on their bicycle and fringes on the handlebars, and whose mother actually brought out Kool-Aid and Popsicles when it was 105 degrees in the shade.

We were essentially good kids because we lived such sheltered lives in these suburbs away from the city, and because the hoods and the greasers were all living on the other side of the highway we weren’t allowed to cross, near the railroad tracks where they say a young girl was murdered by a crazed hobo. Our mothers told us the drifter was most likely looking to kill children who disobeyed and crossed the street.

Because the boys on our block were all older and had their own agendas — baseball and bike riding — we girls were free to stretch out in our own feminine imaginations. We pretended to be horses and drank pond water, shaking our hair like manes. We made stews out of leaves and dirt and made our younger sisters eat them. We sometimes lived all day in tree tops, hidden by great waterfalls of weeping willow, our limbs strewn over branches, languid from heat.

We hardened our feet by going barefoot all summer, the mark of a real pioneer woman, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, or of wild independence, like the moppet Pippi Longstocking, who lived alone with a monkey and a horse.

Most often my sister and I hung out with the Laabs kids who lived across the street. They all had flaming red hair, freckles and names that started with an L.

Mrs. Laabs was an enigma in the neighborhood, someone who drank diet Pepsi, chain-smoked, gardened in a bikini, and was most remembered among homemakers for wearing a mini skirt and matching white go-go boots to the grade school’s spring concert. (I’m sure the husbands remembered, too.)

It was the one house we could sneak back into during the day because Mrs. Laabs liked to watch television in her bedroom, with the door closed. We’d tiptoe up the stairs and stare in wonder at the oldest girl’s bedroom with its walls painted black and the hanging “love beads,” fake fur rugs, fishnet stockings and tubes of eyeliner and mascara. It was rumored she was a hippie, who was once sent home from high school for sitting crossed-legged on the library floor in protest against the dress code, which forbid women from wearing pants.

On the last Sunday night before the start of school after a lazy, but too-short summer vacation, my parents would invite all the neighborhood kids over — wearing their pajamas — and haul the old console television out onto the front porch.

Our now browned bodies laid out on blankets dotting the front lawn, we watched “Bonanza” and “The Wonderful World of Disney” underneath the stars, like we were at a drive-in movie show. My dad passed around pink Tupperware bowls filled with popcorn, then just stood among us like a sentinel, smoking his pipe and breathing in the night air.

We were on top of the world, and thought nothing in life could ever get better than this.