Thinking About...This and That: Playing

Thinking About,

Playing

I rarely see children playing outside. Not that my neighborhood has many children but the few that live near me never seem to play outdoors.

How well I remember playing when I was a little girl. During warm weather, we gathered together on the corner, played tag, hide and seek, kick the can and the all-time favorite, stickball. During winters, we grabbed our sleds and headed for the nearest hill. We had snowball fights, built forts and snowmen and ice-skated on the local pond. We played outdoors, and we played hard.

What do today’s children do for fun" Organized sports, Nintendo, T.V, Gameboy? Do they play using their imaginations? Playing Tarzan used to be one of my favorites. We’d jump from a porch, pretending to swing on a vine, going into the hostile river to save someone from alligators.

After school we roller skated, strapping skates to our shoes, turning the key to tighten them to fit and then hung the string with the key around our necks. Sometimes we fell on cracks in the sidewalk as we raced each other to the corner.

Our imaginations could run rampant. At night we vividly imaged, “Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons” on the radio. With eyes tightly shut, we tried to conjure up, ‘The Shadow’, who knew what images lurked behind the faces of man. We knew what would happen if Fibber McGee opened the closet. We heard his wife Molly saying, “don’t open that closet, McGee” then the sounds of crashing and banging would delight us as we imagined him being surrounded by ‘stuff’.

Saturdays were the movie matinees. We had our special section up front where we stood for the playing of the National Anthem, and giggled at the cartoons. How often we held our breaths at each gripping end of the serial and laughed uproariously at the antics of Abbott and Costello. We screamed and cheered wildly for Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy, and our hearts soared when we heard the bugle call of the Cavalry coming to the rescue.

We were safe in those days. We played outside until dark and walked home without fear. We could go to the corner store without worrying about anything except traffic. The neighborhood watched out for each other. Parents of my friends felt free to scold me if I did something wrong, as my parents did their children. Neighbors were family and neighborhoods were for playing.

Recently I had the opportunity to play with two of my granddaughters. They are cousins, two and twenty-one months. I got down on all fours and played, 'horsy' with them. We pretended to go to the grocery store and pushed an imaginary cart. We had a make-believe driving trip, and I showed them how to wave at cows along the imagined highway. I took them on a verbal, scary lion hunt and laid on the floor with them singing silly songs until it was time for them to get bathed and ready for bed. It was fun, and I enjoyed every minute of it. (Those two granddaughters are in their late-20s now)

Now I know why I miss seeing kids outside playing. I want to join them, have fun, throw a ball, be ‘it’ when playing hide and seek. The little girl in me is still there, and as I think about it, I really don’t play outside anymore either. I miss it.