Step on a Crack, Break Your Back

The games we played. The fun we had; dodge ball, hop scotch, jacks, hide and seek, Cowboy and Indians (one of my favorites) Old Mother Witch Are You Ready, and of course pillow fights. At school we played Hang Man and Hide the Eraser at which I was suspected of cheating, but I never did. I was just intuitive.

When cousins would arrive, added to our baseball team size family, we had the makings of war hoop fun. I usually led the games, general that I was. Some of us were very competitive; some of us just had fun. I won’t mention names. When we played Cowboys and Indians, those of us who were Indians would hide in the adjoining woods, and the Cowboys would look for us. Boy was I a good Indian, probably because I believed I was an Indian. In the 50’s TV was loaded with Westerns and our grandmother Meme loved watching Gunsmoke. I watched westerns with her and for the longest time I thought when people died they had a few last choice words and then went ohhhhh. Pretty straight forward and that’s how I play acted it out in my escapades. I would hide in the woods, up a tree, or crouched down behind a rock. The cowboys would go stalking by, but I was as silent as a doe waiting for its mom. Many times we Indians painted our face with mom’s lip stick and made a band to go around our foreheads. We took our play very seriously. The games would go on until the last slip of light threw shadows on the trees. Then we would reluctantly go back home were we filed into the house with dirty faces, dirty hands and barefoot that we were, very dirty feet. The bathwater handled that.

Games were only one of the ways where we learned competitiveness, good sportsmanship, and strategy. There were also the other kinds of games. Those games would be made up, fed by our imagination. We would improvise as we went along. We invented pretend characters, gave human qualities to inanimate objects, and felt no limitations in the scope or measure of our thoughts. Unlike adulthood we did not create barriers to our success.

I remember that we never walked around puddles, we walked through them. We never worried about germs or hand sanitizers. We laughed at scratches and bumps and the days lasted a life time. We lived in the present with no thoughts to the “what ifs’” and tomorrow. A blessed time and blessed in the adult who can recapture those unbridled moments of spontaneous actions.