I was talking to a Scottish friend of mine, he's a bit younger than I am, and we were playing the game TRADES. When you play Trade or Trades, you say something or different about your life and then they say something different or strange about their life. It's fun. So, he's going on about when he was a kid, mind you, he's about 43 and I'm almost 62, he used to hang upside down on the limbs of the tree and try to catch another tree branch without falling to the ground. His friends and he would try to go as far as they could go without falling or touching the ground. I told him I absolutely understood. The ground is lava, after all.
When I told him I swallowed tadpoles on a dare, he wasn't sure what a tadpole was. I guess they have frogs in Scotland, but I don't think they call the baby wanna-be frogs "tadpoles". When I explained it to him he stared at me with both eyes as wide as they could be, and his mouth was gaping open much like you'd see on a trout fish...you know what I mean. He was dumbfounded. When I went a bit further and explained that we kids would walk barefoot for miles on the hot ground, popping tar bubbles on the way to the creek he again, had no idea what a tar bubble was. Really? Tar bubbles are the bubbles that form when the sun is beating down on the road that's just been given maintenance once over by the city crew team to fill in cracks. The tar gets hot, it bubbles up, and you pop the bubbles with your fingernails. Apparently, it doesn't get that hot in Scotland.
After a few more exchanges I explained to him that our slides didn't have soft covers, and they emptied out onto the concrete playground, maybe onto pebbles, but never onto grass or something made of rubber that would have been beneficial. I told him the swings were mounted (sometimes) on the concrete too, and when you got dared to jump out of one you did it hoping to land on your feet because skinning your knees really hurt....really hurt. Again, with the popping eyes.
We drank out of the water hoses that were connected to our houses. We drank out of water hoses that were connected to other people's houses too. We jumped over fences that stood in the way of where we were going, and if someone (a neighbor) invited you into their house for dinner you called your mom to see if it was OK. You said Grace, you ate whatever was being served. We didn't choose what we ate, we were kids. We didn't argue about it either, we were kids. We never cussed until we were old enough to do so, and if our parents popped us in the mouth for it, we understood. What a difference 18 years made; and a few thousand miles. He said he would have been mortified if his parents had slapped him across the face. Really? I guess I just thought that's what we deserved. They never did it if we were good. I know that much.
We collected bottles from trashcans and from under things so we could haul them up to the grocery store and get a nickel for each one of them. If they were broken or cracked we didn't get the nickel. We took care of those bottles! We ate candy shaped like cigarettes and bubble gum that looked like pink, yellow, and green cigars. We popped open a bottle of root beer, which isn't beer at all, and we poured it over our ice cream. We still do that. We'd eat the bubble gum cigars and candy cigarettes if we could find them.
When I think about what I survived; all the dodgeball games, tag, Red-Rover, and that silly game called knuckles that boys always tried to get us to play, I think we may very well have a reason to stand up and refuse to do some of the stupid things our government and others who haven't been woken up at dawn by a lunatic mother singing "Rise and Shine and Give God the Glory!" That woman was pure bonkers! She redeemed herself a few minutes later every morning by cooking us a mess of bacon, eggs, biscuits, and chocolate gravy! God, let me be a kid again - - I don't want to party like it's 1999, I want to play, sleep, eat, and communicate like it's 1969 again. Please?
Give me that old-time religion. Give me the days when your grandmother said it wouldn't rain and it didn't matter one lick what the weatherman said, he didn't know as much as she did anyway. Give me the days when dogs ran the streets with or without collars and everyone knew which one belonged to you, your neighbor, or maybe someone on another block, but stray dogs were taken into houses and given a name. They weren't overbred to the point that millions of them had to be put down. Give me the times when a preacher was moral, and you could trust that what they preached was true. Give me the parents who aren't afraid to use a belt properly, then sit a kid down to explain what just happened and why it shouldn't happen again. Give me libraries where a kid at age 5 can walk in and "read" books by herself and not worry about anyone stealing her; and if she didn't wear her shoes into the place no one really talked about her or her family.
We were kids. We didn't know we were poor. We were kids. We had no idea what color someone else may have been or why they weren't the same color we were. We were kids. We knew when the street light came on, we were to go straight home...or call Mom to let her know where we were and when to expect us. I miss that. I suppose I'm blessed to be able to TRADE my stories with others. I like hearing about their lives as well. Maybe if we all played our cards right, we could go back to those better days, but something tells me we'll have to wait until Jesus turns HIS porch light on, but when He does....I'm going straight home! That much I know.
Photo Credit: Unknown (Twitter)
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