Go Play Outside

The balmy weather and golden afternoons we're having just now have put me in mind of childhood days-- when my friends and I would play outside till it was too dark to see. I count myself lucky to have grown up in the late Forties and the Fifties -- before there were so many electronic distractions and -- at least till 1953 when my grandparents bought a television so we could watch The Coronation -- no TV.   What's more, I lived in a suburban neighborhood where we knew pretty much every family on the block and there were lots of kids to play with -- Marcella, just across the street, Louise next door, Nancy in the house behind ours. and farther down the street were Carla and Lee and DeHart, to name only a few.  (DeHart's mother was famous for calling him in stages. "Dee! Time to come home." And when he didn't, she upped the urgency. "DeHart!" Soon followed by "DeHart Ayala! Come home NOW!" But still he would linger, waiting for the inevitable, "WILLIAM DEHART AYALA!" that signified imminent peril and the dire necessity of scuttling home at once.) Simple games like Mother, May I? or Red Light, Green Light or Swing the Statue kept us entertained for hours.  And there was lots of pretending -- cowboys with cap guns and Indians and horses were favorites. (We had punk trees in the back yard with several low, almost horizontal branches that made good horses.) I don't recall any princesses. The breezeway between our house and carport had a concrete floor, perfect for hopscotch or jacks. Eventually a sidewalk was added to our block and I was given a pair of skates -- those clamp-on metal ones -- but I was pretty hopeless at skating. Bikes, though, that was another matter. Oh, the joy of heading off, sometimes with a sandwich packed, to ride around the neighborhood and dine al fresco in a certain huge Banyan tree!                                      
As I grew older, some of the best games were not on my block but in the neighborhood around my grandparents' house. Kick the Can at the Hall's (they had a large yard and lots of handy bushes for hiding and sneaking) and Capture the Flag at Jeep Connor's where a side yard divided by a line of trees and shrubs was the perfect setting for a game usually played in the twilight time between supper and black dark. It was an idyllic childhood, in many ways -- there were still vacant lots to play in and still a feeling of safety. Parents could allow their children to roam, to climb trees, to be gone for hours. All that changed eventually. Not twenty years later I was on a visit home -- a grown and married woman -- when I told my mother I was going to walk over to my grandparents' house -- a matter of maybe a quarter of a mile. "Oh, no!" I was told. I must take the car. Someone had been mugged in his driveway nearby. The neighborhood wasn't safe anymore.