Things kids used to do
By David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — Let’s say you’re about 13 years old and you’re walking along next to the highway…
You
noticed, didn’t you? We’re not talking about a contemporary 13-year-old
here, are we? This is a way-long time ago, like 1962 or thereabouts.
Because you don’t see a lot of unchauffeured kids just walking casually
around — without helmets — anywhere these days, much less next to a
highway.
But honest to God, there was once a time when Highway 12
was just out your front door, and the closest thing to a sidewalk in
the neighborhood was the edge of that very highway — between the
milkweeds and the blacktop — where cars zipped by at 50 mph and the
semis roared past like runaway boxcars. And if you were, say, 13 years
old, you looked forward to one of those 18-wheel behemoths thundering in
your direction, because you’d grab the sky and yank it down a couple of
times while grinning at the driver. Because the trucker, well, he saw
kids along the road all the time, most of whom did the same thing, which
was to pantomime the pull of an overhead cord on a locomotive airhorn.
And
the trucker, if he was a nice guy — most were, as I recall — would blow
his horn and wave. It was a cheap thrill but it always tingled my
follicles.
I don’t think kids still do that. If one tried, I’m
not sure if any trucker would get the drift. Truckers aren’t supposed to
smile at strange kids now. Nobody is.
We used to go outside
after supper (I’m not sure it’s called “supper” any longer) and play,
‘til it was pitch-dark, any of the following: kickball, four-square, red
rover, hide-and-go-seek, statues, hopscotch, pom pom…
Ah, pom
pom pollaway. This was our default game at recess (do they still do
recess? Or are there liability issues?), when weather made the
playground unfit for softball, football two-line soccer (or if we’d
destroyed the ball and the school wouldn’t buy a new one). You were
supposed to shout, “Pom pom pollaway, come or I’ll pull y’away!” But
doing the whole stupid rhyme was sissy beyond any kid’s concept of
manliness. So, whoever was “it” just shouted, “Pom pom.”
Speaking of which, does the concept of “it” still exist?
I’m not going to teach you pom pom here. If you’ve lived this long without playing it, or even knowing what it is, well, Thomas Hobbes is on the phone for you.
So,
let’s say you’re 13, school just let out. Where do you go? No, I mean,
where would you go if there were no yoga/karate classes, or smartphones,
iPods, headsets, video games or even videos and there was only one TV
channel on earth, and the only show was a creepy old fart named “Uncle
Ken” doing a bad local-station impression of Art Linkletter. (Please, don’t say, “Art who?”)
Anyway,
school’s out. You head to the best schoolyard in the neighborhood —
which, for me, was across the street at the “public” school. There was
always a game. Baseball, football, work-up, capture-the-flag, maul ball,
or a sort of generalized brawl called, for lack of a wittier term,
“war.” In the winter, there were forts and iceball battles so merciless
that a few kids always went home bleeding.
If they got up a game
with too many kids, and you were the odd kid out — my usual status —
you didn’t snivel and go home pouting. You hung, because each team had
at least three kids with afternoon paper routes, delivering the La
Crosse Tribune or the Milwaukee paper. Sometime before 4:30,
those kids had to split. They had a job — which set them above every
other unemployed goldbrick in the 7th grade. It also identified them as
punctual, businesslike, bound-for-success and financially independent.
Each kid with a paper route cleared three, four, five bucks a week, for
less than 30 hours on the job! For riding your bike!
(Every paper
delivered exactly on time, every day, exactly where every customer
wanted it — because for each kid with a paper route, there were 50 kids
who wanted one.)
When the paper-route tycoons took off, the main
alpha bully in the game looked over the misfits leaning on the fence,
ankle-deep in sandburs. He might point to me and say, “Hey, ass-face. Go
out to right field.” That’s why I hung.
Or, let’s say, one day,
bulldozers show up in what used to be a hayfield. By nightfall, they’ve
ripped a half-dozen holes in the earth, each with a matching pile of
dirt. And no fence to keep kids out of the holes or off the hills. Used
to be, no kid could resist such bounty dropped from the blue. And no
parent even thought to warn kids away from the holes and mounds and the
idle bulldozers. The alternative was kids in the house “under foot,”
screaming, bickering, fighting, spilling.
You took your tin
trucks and cast-iron cars to the mountains, and built intricate roadways
that ended in caves. You took shovels, sticks, kitchen utensils to the
pits that were meant — someday — to be basements and you excavated great
crumbling holes in the dirt walls. Once, on a new street a-building
(ten houses at once) out beyond Grandpa Schaller’s barn, we discovered
bones — skulls, teeth, ribs, femurs, tibiae, pelvises — certain that we
had found the Wisconsin branch of the La Brea tarpits.
Dire wolves and sabertooths, triceratopses and stegosauri! Brought them
inside, laid them on the kitchen table next to the pot roast and the
cooling loaves of bread “Look, look!” we cried. “Call National Geographic!”
The grownup response: “Cows.” And: “Get those filthy things out of here!”
Oh,
well. Back to the holes and the hills, and a twilight dirtball battle.
And, inevitably: “Ouch! Hey! That was a rock, you dickhead!”
OK, another possibility. Let’s say it’s summer, and you’re 10 and you’ve got a toy gun, maybe even a BB gun…
Come on. Who am I kidding? Nobody has toy guns anymore. Kids get the real thing nowadays — or, even worse — virtual guns.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
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1 comment:
Another home run Mr. Benjamin. I have to show this one to my sons, and grandsons. Thank you.
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