On a Playground Is Where I Spent Most of My Days

One of my biggest pet peeves is people talking about the good ol’ days.  From the rosy picture of everyone being respectful to the talk about how awesome Care Bears are, I’m just a hater all around. I’m not against saying that one era might be better than another, but I think it’s ridiculous to believe it’s only been downhill since [fill in the blank].

So, maybe it’s just as ridiculous of me to think the way I grew up has been lost somehow.   Whatever kids are doing with their time these days,  I grew up playing outside and I’m really happy I did.

Lately, I’m only outside to walk from my apartment to my car from my car to class from class to work from work to home.  So I’m all about romanticizing those hours and days and summers spent outside just trying to keep from dying of boredom.  It seemed as much a threat as quick sand.

I remember especially when my elementary school built a new playground.  I lived within walking distance, so when I didn’t come home that day, because I’d spent the afternoon playing on the new playground, my sister came looking for me, sure I was kidnapped by a danger stranger.  I lived for those orange rings next to the regular old monkey bars.  I still have the callouses to remind me.

And then after what seemed like decades, but was no more than a couple years, we got tired of the new playground and thought we were cooler for going back to the old decrepit one.  Somehow my friend Elyse and I managed to convince a gang of girls to let us lead them into a series of dares.  The reward was being named part of the Rooster Club.  We called it the Rooster Club because you were a chicken if you wouldn’t drop straight from the top of the fire pole to the gravel below, but if you were brave enough then you were a rooster.  We even had membership cards created by me.  When we got tired of that, we started timing each other to see how fast we could climb the giant tires half buried in the ground.  The trick was that you had to do it with no hands.  Then it was back to the orange rings, then tether ball, basketball, four square, freeze tag.  Whatever we did, that was all we did until we were sick of it.  There was no tires on Mondays, monkey bars on Tuesdays.  It was tether ball for September and October, basketball for Winter, and then back to freeze tag in the Spring because we’d forgotten how fun that was.

That was just my life at school.  The neighborhood held a whole separate set of friends and activities.  We roller bladed, made up plays, rode skate boards down steep driveways, played Red Rover until the time I split my knee open, had lemonade stands that made no money because we lived in a cul de sac, played capture the flag when we had enough people, built forts, rode bikes.

In fifth grade, we moved and I picked up with a new group of neighborhood kids.  I kept up with them until high school.  I’d outgrown a lot of the activities, but I had no better way to fill all that wide open time.  One of our last big projects was to start a neighborhood newspaper.  It did not meet a lot of success in its initial run, but we heard from its fans years after printing ceased.

I miss spending all day with friends, playing games, being creative, spending time outside.  Most of all, I miss the free time.  I guess I can see why people romanticize the past.  It makes for a nice contrast.