Sunday, March 26, 2006

A Memory of Childhood Wonder

I don't know what got me thinking of this but I thought I would do a little post on it anyway.

Today, I was walking home from church and the Teenager and I were swinging Touchdown high into the air and she was thoroughly ecstatic. She couldn't have been having any more fun. She was in her element; an element where the world is good and just being in it is sufficient. It got me thinking of things that used to be good enough to waste away a day doing. These are some of them.

1. Making a blanket fort. My brother and I loved this, and who doesn't? There is nothing as totally carefree as a good blanket fort. We love draping the blankets over the card table and the ping-pong table in our basement in Heyburn.

2. Having Dad throw the nerf football over the side of the house and diving to make the catch. If my brother or I succeeded in making the catch, it was imperative to emerge from behind the house with the ball held high like a trophy.

3. Jumping out of the Swings. It could get dangerous, as the swings at the elementary school were exceedingly high, but even if you plunged to your death trying to break the record, there would be glory and admiration from all of my buddies.

4. Jigsaw puzzles by candlelight. Often in the middle of the winter when the snow was drifting over the houses and school was cancelled and the power would go out, we would all sit down at the dining table and do a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle by candlelight. It was a good enough way to spend the evening.

5. Throwing rocks to our dog, Sally. Yep, Sally was a rock dog. She would chase the rock down or catch it in her mouth and then bring it back to us so we could throw it again. She was quite the dog.

6. Burning the ditchbank. Since we lived on the farm and burning the ditchbank was required, we became quite the little pyromaniacs. I still enjoy a good flamethrower.

7. Collecting aluminum cans from the side of the road. My brother and I would walk about six miles or so to Norland collecting all the cans from the side of the road. It was a long and dirty chore but we made like 2 cents a pound.

8. Bologna sandwiches. I used to love to bend them in half and take a bite out of the middle so it looked like a hole in the middle of the sandwich. I still like doing it to be truthful.

9. Listening to Karen Carpenter, Neil Diamond, Ray Coniff, and Burt Bacharach 8-tracks in the basement of our house in Heyburn. This was usually combined with the blanket forts and the bologna sandwiches. "Hey, won't ya sing, another somebody done somebody wrong song?" I don't really remember how it went.

10. Getting grounded and sent to my room only to play catch with my imprisoned brother who was also grounded in his room across the hall. The reason for the grounding was usually that we were fighting, so it made sense that we would then play catch with each other.

8 Comments:

Blogger Le laquet said...

Eating so many sour crab apples from the tree in the garden that you got belly ache!

The "no fear" element, walking/running along the top of the ruined pig sty (about 8 foot high) in the garden to jump into the next door neighbours garden landing on their lawn doing a forward roll!

It was all huge fun!

9:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

1. Cops and robbers, and believe it or not, the robbers won some of the time.

2. Swinging from a large tree in Pagosa Spring Colo. only to have an older brother tell me to let go at the wrong time and suffered a broken wrist.

3. Going into a bar to get my dad to come home. Met some fine men during that time. I couldn't understand why they thought it was so fun to drink and throw up.....

4. Finding a 6 pack of beer in the refrigerator at home, didn't want my dad to drink. So I opened all of the cans and emptied them, I admit I took a sip of 2 or 3 cans it was so nasty, I was never interested in making drinking one of my foolish behaviors.

5. Wanting to hang out with my brother and his friends, I would pay for his ticket to a show, only to be denied a seat with them once we were inside. I learned quickly that I wouldn't do that very often.

6. Thanks King for bringing some of those things to my mind.

7:23 AM  
Blogger Lucy Stern said...

I liked taking the skate board down to the school and skating around the flag pole. We would gather up speed on the side walk and then zip around the flag pole and pray that we didn't fall down. It was so much fun.

Going down to the bayou and walking around. There was a tree that had a rope on it and we would swing and NOT fall into the bayou. Getting wet was not allowed.

Riding my bike after school. We had to be home before dark or Dad would spank us. I was alway home before dark. Dad had a big leather belt. Kids can't do that these days, it's a shame.

My dad built us a "cottage climber" play house in the back yard. My brother and sisters would climb up on top and play. We could go inside and play house if we wanted. It was so much fun.

During the summer mom would let us water the front yard in our bathing suits. Summer in Houston with no air-conditioning begged for a good watering. Lots of fun there.

Dad taking us down to the beach every weekend during the summer. Fun.

Little league baseball games. The whole family was involved.

Friday night at the drive in movies. We had a station wagon and we would put on our "jammies" and go to the movies. It was so late when we got home that mom and dad just carried us to bed.

Lots of memories. I hope we gave our kids some good memories like this.

11:12 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Those are some great memories!

4:06 PM  
Blogger Le laquet said...

The spammers got you Jones! I wonder what they didi when they were kids?

10:07 PM  
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