Child's Play

“Back in the day” …

Oops, is that really a good way to start today’s blog?

Hmm, yes, but I can hear some of you saying “don’t you just hate it when old/older people say things like that?”

All I can say in reply is “just you wait; one of these days you’ll be saying it, too!”

Anyway, back in the day, meaning my childhood days, kids really knew how to play. We had inside games, outside games, family games, travel games and playground games. The funny thing about our games was that they required simple pieces and absolutely no electricity.

At home we played any number of board games, Monopoly, Sorry, Shoots-and-Ladders, Chinese Checkers and Parcheesi.

In the tavern yards, we played baseball, tag, crack the whip, hide-and-seek, made daisy chains and caught fireflies.

On holidays our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles taught us checkers and card games.

We played memory or observation games while on trips.

In the schoolyards, when we weren’t taking a turn on the swings, teeter-totter or monkey bars, the boys played catch, marbles, and semi-organized sports, and the girls made leaf-outlined houses, bounced small balls off brick walls, and played jacks on the blacktop. We played London Bridges, colored eggs and Red Rover. We also had hundreds of rhymes for jump-roping.

There was no limit to the amount of fun we could have with unbridled imaginations and three recesses a day!

We, meaning just my family and not the general population, didn’t have many after-school activities. Once a week I went to Girl Scout meetings in the basement of a church a block away from my grade school; and my mom was the Den mother for Cub Scout meetings at our house. For a while a sibling and I went to the Good News Club to learn Bible verses, but I think we did it for the bookmarks, memory games and refreshments, and not because of any religious fervor.

We spent weekends with our parents and their friends at the local bar or at each other’s houses for barbeques. The parents talked, danced, played cards and pool. The kids went out to play or huddled at the back tables, playing cards, telling scary stories and sleeping on chairs.

We spent weeknights watching a few, select television shows—only after dinner and homework were done. Our parents picked the shows and there were just two or three stations to chose from. Saturday mornings we kids got to watch cartoons in our pajamas, but then the television was turned off and mom was quick to tell us to “get dressed and go outside and play.”

We played on the swings dad hung from our trees. We played in the creek. We took sticks and made farms under the shady oak in the front yard. We climbed trees. We rode our bikes. We played from daybreak to dark and only came in when it was too wet, cold or dark for our parents to let us stay out. We played outside as long in each season as the weather permitted, and we liked it.

Back in the day,
being sent to your room was a real punishment. Well, it wasn’t as bad as being spanked, but at least with a spanking it was over and forgotten quickly. Exile in your room seemed to last forever! (and being sent to your room after a spanking was pure torture!) You knew you were in big, big trouble if you got both.

The worst part about being sent to your room was that the rest of the family was playing games without you. There was fun happening right on the other side of your bedroom door and you were missing it. How sad and terrible! (Big sigh!)

Visiting some relatives could be a chore, especially when there were no children in the household because no matter how young you were you had to sit quietly for a long time and there was "nothing to do!" My godmother and her sister had a quiet household with not much for children to play with. The only thing close to a toy there was a box of dominos and a small, iron man that used to sit on my dad's toy tractor. We spent hours making houses and towers around that little, old farmer.

Another exception to the "no children" household was at my great-aunt Gillie's. No matter what the grownups were doing, we kids knew there was always something for us to do, too. Aunt Gillie reserved the bottom drawer in her desk just for us. It held odds and ends of nothing much, but always included a regular deck of cards, and maybe a deck of Old Maid and Authors, a strawberry basket of marbles, a kaleidoscope, and a wooden game board her father had made. (Can you tell by this list that we were easily amused?)

We may have taken it for granted at the time, but deep down we felt important to her and loved because she kept that special place in her home, just for us. It was a treasure trove of fun for many generations—for her and her siblings, cousins and friends, for my dad, uncle, aunt, their cousins and friends, for me, my siblings and cousins, and for my kids and their cousins.

What a wonderful legacy she gave us!

I feel sorry for kids nowadays. A lot of them, though not all, have everything they could possibly want, by way of entertainment, in their rooms—TV, DVD players, game systems, internet access on their personal computers and cell phones.

What incentive is there for them to behave? The threat of being sent to their room is nonexistent. I mean, what the hey! Their rooms are better equipped than our living rooms were!

They don’t need an imagination to play games someone else invented and they don’t even need playmates when they can play all alone.

They seldom learn games with their elders so they rarely spend the time it takes to get to know someone who lived in a world different from their own.

They don’t learn how to entertain themselves and they don’t learn to be self-sufficient.

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of fun to be had in today’s world of technology and I take full advantage of it. I love playing my computer games, on and off line. I like the convenience of owning a hand held game I can tuck into my purse.

Believe it or not, I don't think all things new are bad.

I do think, however; kids today are missing some of the fun we used to have. I’m so glad I learned to play at such an early age, and that I still know how to use my imagination and still love to play the simple games!

I think I’ll always be that girl in the playground with my imaginary horse.

Hey, you wanna play?