Things kids used to do

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#663)

Things kids used to do

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Let’s say you’re about 13 years old and you’re walking along next to the highway…

You noticed, didn’t you? We’re not talking about a contemporary 13-year-old here, are we? This is a way-long time ago, like 1962 or thereabouts. Because you don’t see a lot of unchauffeured kids just walking casually around — without helmets — anywhere these days, much less next to a highway.

But honest to God, there was once a time when Highway 12 was just out your front door, and the closest thing to a sidewalk in the neighborhood was the edge of that very highway — between the milkweeds and the blacktop — where cars zipped by at 50 mph and the semis roared past like runaway boxcars. And if you were, say, 13 years old, you looked forward to one of those 18-wheel behemoths thundering in your direction, because you’d grab the sky and yank it down a couple of times while grinning at the driver. Because the trucker, well, he saw kids along the road all the time, most of whom did the same thing, which was to pantomime the pull of an overhead cord on a locomotive airhorn.

And the trucker, if he was a nice guy — most were, as I recall — would blow his horn and wave. It was a cheap thrill but it always tingled my follicles.

I don’t think kids still do that. If one tried, I’m not sure if any trucker would get the drift. Truckers aren’t supposed to smile at strange kids now. Nobody is.

We used to go outside after supper (I’m not sure it’s called “supper” any longer) and play, ‘til it was pitch-dark, any of the following: kickball, whiffleball, four-square, red rover, hide-and-go-seek, statues, hopscotch, pom pom…

Ah, pom pom pollaway. This was our default game at recess (do they still do recess? Or are there liability issues?), when weather made the playground unfit for softball, football two-line soccer (or if we’d destroyed the ball and the school wouldn’t buy a new one). You were supposed to shout, “Pom pom pollaway, come or I’ll pull y’away!” But doing the whole stupid rhyme was sissy beyond any kid’s concept of manliness. So, whoever was “it” just shouted, “Pom pom.”

Speaking of which, does the concept of “it” still exist?

I’m not going to teach you pom pom here. If you’ve lived this long without playing it, or even knowing what it is, well, Thomas Hobbes is on the phone for you.

So, let’s say you’re 13, school just let out. Where do you go? No, I mean, where would you go if there were no yoga/karate classes, or smartphones, iPods, headsets, video games or even videos and there was only one TV channel on earth, and the only show was a creepy old fart named “Uncle Ken” doing a bad local-station impression of Art Linkletter. (Please, don’t say, “Art who?”)

Anyway, school’s out. You head to the best schoolyard in the neighborhood — which, for me, was across the street at the “public” school. There was always a game. Baseball, football, work-up, capture-the-flag, maul ball, or a sort of generalized brawl called, for lack of a wittier term, “war.” In the winter, there were forts and iceball battles so merciless that a few kids always went home bleeding.

If they got up a game with too many kids, and you were the odd kid out — my usual status — you didn’t snivel and go home pouting. You hung, because each team had at least three kids with afternoon paper routes, delivering the La Crosse Tribune or the Milwaukee paper. Sometime before 4:30, those kids had to split. They had a job — which set them above every other unemployed goldbrick in the 7th grade. It also identified them as punctual, businesslike, bound-for-success and financially independent. Each kid with a paper route cleared three, four, five bucks a week, for less than 30 hours on the job! For riding your bike!

(Every paper delivered exactly on time, every day, exactly where every customer wanted it — because for each kid with a paper route, there were 50 kids who wanted one.)

When the paper-route tycoons took off, the main alpha bully in the game looked over the misfits leaning on the fence, ankle-deep in sandburs. He might point to me and say, “Hey, ass-face. Go out to right field.” That’s why I hung.

Or, let’s say, one day, bulldozers show up in what used to be a hayfield. By nightfall, they’ve ripped a half-dozen holes in the earth, each with a matching pile of dirt. And no fence to keep kids out of the holes or off the hills. Used to be, no kid could resist such bounty dropped from the blue. And no parent even thought to warn kids away from the holes and mounds and the idle bulldozers. The alternative was kids in the house “under foot,” screaming, bickering, fighting, spilling.

You took your tin trucks and cast-iron cars to the mountains, and built intricate roadways that ended in caves. You took shovels, sticks, kitchen utensils to the pits that were meant — someday — to be basements and you excavated great crumbling holes in the dirt walls. Once, on a new street a-building (ten houses at once) out beyond Grandpa Schaller’s barn, we discovered bones — skulls, teeth, ribs, femurs, tibiae, pelvises — certain that we had found the Wisconsin branch of the La Brea tarpits. Dire wolves and sabertooths, triceratopses and stegosauri! Brought them inside, laid them on the kitchen table next to the pot roast and the cooling loaves of bread “Look, look!” we cried. “Call National Geographic!”

The grownup response: “Cows.” And: “Get those filthy things out of here!”

Oh, well. Back to the holes and the hills, and a twilight dirtball battle. And, inevitably: “Ouch! Hey! That was a rock, you dickhead!”

OK, another possibility. Let’s say it’s summer, and you’re 10 and you’ve got a toy gun, maybe even a BB gun…

Come on. Who am I kidding? Nobody has toy guns anymore. Kids get the real thing nowadays — or, even worse — virtual guns.