Can Jimmy Come Out and Play
Can Jimmy Come Out and Play
When I was a snot-nosed kid growing up in Georgia, we pretty much made up our own games, indulged in shooting marbles, rode bikes, made soapbox cars, played hide and seek, sardines, kick the can, hailey-bailey over and lots of sandlot baseball. The days were unsupervised and unscheduled — they just unrolled in our lazy summer daze depending on weather and the kids we could round up from the ‘hood. Everybody got to play and nobody was excluded. Summertime … and the livin was easy.
Apparently those days are part of a nostalgic past long ago lost to my friends’ kids whose play is as managed as tightly as a NASA space launch. Ballet lessons, soccer practice, judo courses, violin classes, little league baseball, soccer camps, swims at the YMCA, karate classes, polo lessons. So much for spontaneity, hello discipline.
We got the kids on a fast track from pre-school to graduate PhD’s, the little tykes don’t have much time for free-form fun. Our moms would say be back for dinner and off we’d scatter to the four corners of the neighborhood and beyond into the woods. I don’t know if we learned self-reliance out there beyond parental leashes, but I suspect it taught us independence and probably stalled the adolescent urge to revolt. We didn’t have much to rebel against unless we didn’t want dinner served up same time same table, not much of a revolution stewing there.
We camped out in the backyards, we hiked across bogs and woods, we built shabby treehouses and put playing cards in our bike tire spokes. We were the Wild Ones, but … not really. We were kids, grass stained with torn shirts. We fought, we got in trouble, we lived through it. Mostly it was fun. All the time.
I wouldn’t want to be a kid now. Hell, you CAN’T be a kid now. Your parents got you scheduled, signed up, coached, monitored, pushed hard and expected to succeed, no time to waste, certainly not in childish tomfoolery. Fun? Hey, kid, fun is for losers.
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