Summer Days Gone by

June 27th, 2010 - We celebrated my brother's birthday yesterday, which got us thinking about days gone by. It was a beautiful sunny day. You could hear the birds chirpping, the buzz of lawn mowers going, cars passing by, but the one thing we could not hear was children outside playing. Not a single child on the block playing outside. What ever happened to those days where kids played outside instead of sitting in front of their computers, or game boys, or xboxes, or whatever.

As a kid I lived and breathed for the final count down of no school and being able to sleep in (til 7:00), grab some shorts and a t-shirt (back then you could count on the weather being warm) and getting outside. The biggest issue then was we had to wait long enough until mom thought it wasn't too early to go out and wake the neighbors. From early in the morning til late at night the kids would gather and we would play red rover red rover, of course I never got to come over cuz I was so whimpy I wasn't any threat. Kick the can - after begging and begging they finally let me kick the can. Which I did, right through my neighbors front window. I freaked and ran and hid, as if none of the fifteen other kids I was playing with would tell the neighbor who did it. Busted...kick the can was then relegated to the empty lot. That's right the empty lot, where we all played baseball, dodge ball, searched for money through the gravel, and built forts for 'boys only' or 'girls only'. In addition to that we could be found building 'cap guns', go-carts, with old worn out roller skates,(remember skate keys)or trading baseball cards. We also might go looking for empty bottles so we could cash them in for the 2 cent deposit and then buy some penny candy. And on a real hot day, if we were lucky, someone would open the fire hydrant and we would cool off in the spray of the water, while moms and dads sat on the porch watching and laughing at us. What we did not do was stay inside and watch TV, some of us did not have them. Play video games, what the hell are those? or talk on our cell phones for hours, heck our home phone had a lock on it. At the end of the day, you could hear all the moms and dads calling their kids to come home for dinner. We would march in dirty, scraped up, and maybe with a torn knee on our pants. We were tired, and sun tan, and full of stories of make believe. Such a contrast to today's youth, where physical playing has been replaced by video games. Best friends and going over to each other's house is replaced by facebook. And sleep overs are replaced by all night on-line game challenges where each person remains in their own bedroom.

I guess thinking back, my childhood was pretty fun and care free. I wished that for my kids and my grandkids to build those same types of memories. But as with any generation, our kids today are having the time of their life, just doing it in their own way. They are doing and learning about things we could never even imagine. While that is true, I still feel they are missing out on the pure joy of going outside and playing.