I can add more than a few items to that list, as I'm sure you've got some ideas as well. For one thing, we had to rely heavily on our own imaginations.
I can remember my mother actually packing a bag lunch and filling my 'genuine' for-real Army canteen with apple juice or KoolAid for me, so that Steve Imeriale, Kenny Caputo, Bobby Gizzo and I could go to that small patch of brush and trees near the house and we'd play 'Army' all day with no problems or worries.
My father had even scoured a near-by Army-Navy store (do they even still exist?) for ammobelts and canteens and mess kits and even a big knife and sheeth to go on the belt, so I'd be complete when me and Gizzo went out on our 'patrols'.
There was tons of other shit we'd do, too. In the winter we'd sleighride and build snow forts and have snowball battles. In the summers we had bone-breaking backyard Slip 'n Slides we'd play on all day long. Stickball in the strest, 'Booties-up' on any available wall, even kick the can. Because we had imaginations.
Share you memories if you have the time...
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Hikin the half mile or so or riding our bikes to farther spots on the Chenango River to go fishing. Throwing hay bales a couple weeks each summer so we could get access through the farm to the river to some great smallmouth water. Hunting the forest up the hill from my folk's place all fall after school. Cutting, splitting & stacking firewood for winter.... Now that I think about it, not much has really changed...
ReplyDeleteAfter Christmas we would go around the neighborhood and collect the discarded Christmas trees and build forts.
ReplyDeleteThree of us choking on a stolen cigarette and pretending we enjoyed it. Actually enjoyed leafing through an old Playboy up in a tree house we all used. Fixing our own bicycles and oiling virtually any moving surface on the bikes and picking up empties at the construction sites for the $0.02 deposit.
ReplyDeleteyou had street lights??
ReplyDeleteI grew up on a hay farm. Dad was in the Air Guard, retired civil service and he owned a pool table/juke box/video game rental business in the 70's to mid 80's when he sold out. A lot of this is strange to me.
ReplyDeleteAll of it. Although our hide and seek was usually coed. Most kids came to our house as we had a large yards and there where three of us living there. Plus since we moved to town in the mid sixties from the farm we had more distractions. In the winter we had a monopoly game that ran for weeks. Needless to say we had some odd rules to aid that.
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