Random retro
I don’t have anything present day I chose to talk about right now so let me dive back into childhood and talk about how I managed to remain entertained. Present day children are conditioned from a very young age to be entertained by screens, an electronic pacifier. Back in the 70’s the only video content available came in the form of television. In our house we had one of them and it was a large piece of furniture, nothing that could be utilized on the go. Plus because our house was situated at the bottom of hill our TV reception was very poor, getting maybe a half dozen channels, if that.
So back then entertainment and distraction was not thrust upon you, you had to come up with your own ways to make each day interesting. Living on an old farm property gave us many ways to entertain and/or get in trouble. Climbing trees were a big activity for me. I would regularly climb 20 feet or higher into trees, without supervision, something that would be seen as borderline child neglect nowadays. At one point I had the evil idea to throw objects at cars passing on the road while I was way up in one of the dense pine trees. I vividly recall the fear when a car slammed on it’s brakes and the driver came storming out, looking to see where the debris came from. I froze like a statue in the tree, afraid to even breathe as it may reveal my location. Luckily I escaped detection but I never did that stunt again.
Right across that same road there was a creek that was a normal play destination area. The creek was at the base of a very steep hill so it was not unusual for rocks from the hill to roll into the water below. There were two main activities I recall as being my mainstays in the creek, building dams out of the rocks and letting my super hero action figures “swim” down the creek. This was a somewhat risky move as you had to make sure you grabbed the action figure before it got to the more fast moving and deeper water further downstream. Of course bad behavior also occurred at the creek, highlighted by the time I decided to fill Todd’s shoes with mud, for no good reason at all.
The big old barn was a place of polar opposites. On the second story was my dad’s junked Alfa that I used to sit in, imagining I was driving countless times. The second floor also included the old hay stalls that had hay that could have been over a decade old inside of it. As a kid I gave no thought to what sort of disgusting mess I was jumping into time and again, filling my lungs with large quantities of unknown irritants. Rodents of course lived in there as well but I don’t recall seeing many. I also painted a rectangle on the outside wall of the barn that I used once I got into baseball, to work on my accuracy as a pitcher.
The first floor of the barn was a different story. We used to store our bikes in there so I had to go in the side entrance often. I was convinced there was something evil lurking in the stables. I rarely would move my eyes upward when I went in there, just grabbing the bike and and getting the hell out. I was sure if I looked into the distance a pair of red eyes would be looking back at me. I was really fearful of the space.
Speaking of bikes, I used to go on rides by myself all the time. The most common destinations were Brightbill’s store in Gouglersville where I bought the overwhelming majority of my baseball card collection from, one pack at a time. The other spot was Colonial Hills Bowling alley where I spent a small fortune in their arcade over 10 years or so. I even rode my bike a few times to my cousins house, alone which was a distance of probably close to 10 miles.
Bad/stupid behavior on the bike was a thing as well. I’ll never forget the one time that I decided I wanted to attempt to make the 90 degree turn into our driveway without applying my brakes at all. Remember my saying earlier that the house was at the bottom of a long hill. My attempt went terribly wrong as my high speed caused me to swing wide as I entered the driveway, sending me down the small bank that surrounded the house and straight into a tree.
The five or six acres had plenty of other options, the abandoned rusted farm equipment, the fenced in area that we used as a makeshift baseball field, and the woods up behind the garage that had an infinite amount of items to keep us busy. However probably one of the most often used sections of the property was the small strip of grass between the small storage shed and the barn. The strip was maybe 125 feet long and was the spot where most of our 1-2 person athletic competitions took place such as wiffleball, field goal kicking, punting, and tackle football. The amount of games we played in that small section of the property probably numbered into the 1000’s.
Of course we did get screen entertainment as well, especially when my mom bought us a Mattel Intellivision in the early 80’s, which at the time felt like an unreal stroke of good fortune. Todd and I played that thing to absolute death.
I always look back at my childhood as a constant time of discovery of both the good and bad parts of life. When my parents got divorced I experienced some of the darkest points of my childhood. I recall wondering how it was to be an adult like my mom and dad and how in the world I would ever find my way to being one myself someday. It’s surreal to try to reflect on the long and winding path that has gone in many unforeseen directions that have lead me to this moment in time.
What was the point of this entry you ask? There is none, other than a random brain dump about what once was.
Many years ago I made a web page with random short blurbs about periods of my life. If you found this throwback interesting, you may like this as well. http://duf.net/shawn/thoughts.htm