Random memories for your amusement or annoyance.
Outdoor Fun
I’m one of those people that didn’t stray too far from where they grew up. When I have to take the dogs to the vet I go past the old neighborhood. I would love to go inside my old house and see if my hiding spot for contraband was still there.
Between our street and the one parallel with it was an old farmhouse surrounded by fields. The last time I drove through my old stomping grounds construction was just starting to make way for new housing. One of the last vestiges of my youth was bulldozed. I know things move forward but it is still sad to see them go.
So back to the fields. We used to spend a lot of time running around in them. Flying kites, chasing grasshoppers and lightning bugs, freeze tag, kick and wiffle ball or just looking at the stars at night.
Also, What kind of parent would give their children lawn darts to play with?
Lawn darts were fucking awesome. I loved how they moved when you threw them.
I don’t live anywhere near either place where I grew up. Part of that was due to my father’s incessant need for the geographical cure to all his problems (not realizing that no matter where he went…there he was), and part of it was due to my own inability to keep my feet in one spot. Eventually, though, I learned.
One time I did go back to visit the farm where I grew up. It had since been sold at least 1 or 2 times since my family sold it, and the lady there practically pulled me into the house because she didn’t know shit about it’s structural history and wanted to know all she could find out. See, my father thought it would be a great idea to remodel the house…until he tore up the upstairs where my brother and I had our bedrooms, and then he lost interest. It was something like 10 years after we’d moved when I visited this place again–and it still wasn’t finished.
One of the truly stupid things about Jarts was there was no reason why they had to be capable piercing someone’s skull. They could have just as easily been designed with the softer flatter tip the way they are today, instead of a tip capable of penetrating three inches into rock hard clay soil baked as hard as earthenware in a July drought.
Whoever invented cornhole didn’t feel the need to use straight razors instead of beanbags.
Yeah, but in the ’70’s, nobody gave a shit.
Well duh, no one wanted to risk slicing up their hand playing cornhole. Can’t risk making it harder to masturbate.
Thin the herd…bring back lawn darts!!!
We had a vintage croquet set and the balls were like cannonballs. One nicely executed shot could cripple an opponent and the game would be won by default.
That had a self-correcting side where if you took that risk and missed, you had to chase your ball fifty yards into the poison ivy.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Being further down the genealogical tree my younger sister and I inherited a lot of toys from my older siblings. We had an Erector set whose metal braces and beams were razor sharp. A set of splintered and much chewed-upon Lincoln Logs. We had this old electric train set which would now probably be worth a fortune. It wasn’t HO scale, it was much larger. The locomotive was cast-iron and the size of a brick and many times heavier. To put the track together there were prongs and holes on each end of each piece, I think that’s still called male and female, and the prongs were needles sharp and made for effective weapons. The electrical, even then, was very worn and wonky so there was always a thrill when you turned the thing on.
During the summer a common leisure activity was to bike ride (bikes were handed down, slightly rusty, and with razor-sharp metal frames) and a common destination was the local pharmacy to pick up cartons of cigarettes for our stay-at-home moms who didn’t know how to drive. To get to the pharmacy you had to cross a set of railroad tracks with no crossing gate (this, admittedly, was unusual) on a very busy freight line. To cool off there was the quarry in the next town over, which was abandoned, fed by a spring that had broken through, and collected rainwater suffused with God knows what particulates from the granite and whatever else fell into it.
I don’t know how children put up with the helicoptering overparenting. No wonder no one wants to leave their room and spends all their time online.
I did a lot of that same stuff. Also collected bottles to claim deposits. I can’t tell you the number of times I rode 2-3 miles balancing 40 lbs. of glass bottles on my bike handlebars.
Oh yes, I also had a paper route. Nothing like biking down a busy road in the pitch black with no lights and no helmet with a few papers for the neighbors, probably about 40 lbs.-worth. In the snowbelt. Good TIMES!
a little whiles back i had a couple teens snooping around my house
so i scared the crap out of them as they hadn’t noticed me smoking in the shed
turns out one of them was the previous tennants kid (i believe him as he looked pretty shocked when i mentioned the previous tennants last name…i got so much mail for them….also police and debt collectors…and it was a pain in the arse getting internet coz they got the adress blacklisted for not paying bills)
anyways..spent a little time with them wandering around the house…pointing out damages he caused and mentioning theres a kids trike buried in the yard somewhere
and then he asked if they could come inside at which point i had to say nope…its 1 am..the missus is asleep upstairs….and i dont know yous
I loved lawn darts as a kid, nobody ever died though we had some close calls. Still the best episode of Reno 911!
https://www.cc.com/video/xb639y/reno-911-lawn-dart
My cousins and I used to stand in their backyard and throw those thing over the house into the front yard. Completely blind, of course, no lookout or anything,
As part of PE, we had units on archery. So all the kids would be issued bows and arrows, and then we’d stand out in the field and shoot at targets filled with hay. I can’t believe now that was even allowed, but it was done from middle through high school. Of course, kids also had gun racks with shotguns and rifles in the trucks they drove to school, but I digress.
The reason I thought of it was because there was one kid in high school who’d wait until the teacher’s back was turned and he’d fire an arrow in a parabolic arc to one of the school parking lots. I have no idea how many times a student or teacher came out to find an arrow had cracked their windshields or dented or perforated their cars.
My Nonna owned a lot of property that abutted the airport. Nothing could be developed due to regulations. We ran wild there, playing as children, getting up to no good as teens. We left the house as soon as our chores were done, came home sometimes for lunch, always for dinner, then back out until dark or whatever curfew my very lax parents demanded. The times were inconsistent and rarely enforced. We were practically feral. But so we’re most of our friends who were raised the same way.
i was feral in england
but over here in the netherlands….i was out a lot….on my own in the woods..getting up to no good
or coz i saw kids outside and decided to join them
but actually going to friends places to play….yeah…you need an appointment for that
the dutch are seriously hung up on scheduling everything…and it starts as kids
We just had a ton of undeveloped property in the dirt-road neighborhood where I grew up. Dozens of empty lots, with houses sprinkled between them. The lots were all overgrown and wooded, so we spent days and days charging around the woods, building forts and treehouses, and generally screwing around. Generations of kids had worn paths through these places taking shortcuts to each others’ houses. There was a little spring, oddly enough for Florida, that created a tiny swamp where we got constantly muddy.
I drive through occasionally. It’s mostly all developed now.
I’m seeing some comments, by Americans of course, about how they lobbed lawn darts around willy nilly.
They’re banned because of you/them.
Americans are why we can’t have nice things.
Remember me saying this come November.
Trust me, we know.
Yeah this ain’t news to us…
I grew up in a house that was one of the last ones built before the developer went broke & just walked away from an unfinished neighborhood of houses. They also left heavy machinery & other things that could get young kids in trouble. We spent our days having war games in those unfinished houses & running around the storm drains they left open. Good times & hard to believe we didn’t get killed.
We used to play beam tag wherever there was construction. We’re lucky nobody was ever impaled on rebar.
We had an open storm sewer in one section of the neighborhood that we called the creek. It went under the street and opened up again about 100 feet away. So naturally we played in there. We also would use 7Eleven big gulp cups to catch crawdads.