Unlike you in your little town of 200 souls, I grew up on the sidewalks of Brooklyn, but the dynamic was the same. (Of course, this was back in late Medieval times, somewhere between the Crusades and the Wars of the Roses.) We, too, would spend the day outdoors, unsupervised, playing New York street games like ringalevio, scully, boxball, and stoopball, until our mothers called out the window for dinner. Nobody had to run off to violin lessons, soccer practice, or “play dates,” whatever those might be; you just went out the door in the morning and back in at lunch and dinnertime.
There was a vacant lot around the back of our block where people used to dump their discarded household items. The place was fenced in with chicken wire, but one corner of the fence had been cut into a flexible flap big enough for a child-sized human to slip through. We spent hours in that lot playing with the treasures people had left. One time somebody dumped an old upright piano back there; we spent days dismantling it and fiddling with all the key, hammer, and pedal mechanisms. Endless fun!
Kids who didn’t have a bike would build a home-made scooter out of a length of two-by-four with an orange crate from the corner grocery store nailed upright to one end for a dashboard/handlebar. The wheels came from one of those old-fashioned roller skates that clamped on over your street shoes. You would remove the center bolt to separate the front and back halves of the adjustable skate and nail them to the ends of the two-by-four, two wheels in front and two in back. Propulsion was strictly by kicking along on the pavement, but one year somebody discarded an old, non-electric, treadle-operated sewing machine back in our Treasure Lot. The kids downstairs and nextdoor, two boys a couple of years older than me who were inseparable friends, spent the summer huddled together trying to figure out how to use the treadle mechanism to power their scooter. They never did succeed.
Incidentally, one of those two inseparable boys was black and the other was white. The neighborhood gang (a far less sinister word than it is today) was blissfully biracial, and nobody gave it a second thought. They were all just the kids on the block. I can’t imagine that happening today, either.
When did kids stop getting to be kids?
