It's once again Father's Day and once again I think about my dad, how although my mother was the BIG presence in my life when I was young, it was my dad that really formed (through disagreeing and agreeing) how I think and act. I miss him on Sundays, when he would call every week from Ottawa to Hamilton or Toronto to find out how I was doing. How he wrote to me when I lived in the UK (sadly I didn't keep that correspondence). I cringe now that I sometimes avoided those calls, didn't appreciate how hard he was trying to show that he loved me. We can't always find the words so we try by our actions but then those actions get misinterpreted.
Anyway, today is a day of reflection and, in that vein, I am responding to what is, I think, my last question on Storyworth. It's been a year since I started answering the Storyworth questions, my "book" has been published, around 196 pages. I didn't realize I had a few more questions still to answer before I published the book but, oh well, it's there on my shelf now. It will be passed along to Laurie and the grandkids, I hope that they find it helpful. I would surely have loved a book like that from my parents.
So, the question was: What games did you play as a kid? And here's the answer:
Wow, we had so many games! Indoor games, outdoor games, summer games, winter games, games I played by myself or with one other person, group games....
Indoor: chess, checkers, snakes & ladders, the precursors to Lego as well as a kind of Lincoln Logs type set, a hockey game that looked a bit like a small pinball machine, Yahtzee.
My mom taught me how to play Solitaire and I played endless games when no one else was around to play with. I didn’t play as much Solitaire as my sister did who, my mother claimed, spent her entire 16th summer playing Solitaire. I played other card games like Fish, War, Old Maid, Cribbage, and, yes, my mother taught me how to play Poker for matchsticks.
I also played with dolls and paper dolls. I never had a Barbie doll but I had a few Debbie dolls which were like Barbies, they had costumes that you could buy separately. I also drew, colored, put on puppet shows with my next door neighbor (we did that outside as well), took my dad’s wooden sawhorses and converted them into pretend horses so we could play Cowboys. I went through a short spate of using only red for my coloring books until my mother said that the “totally red” wedding was over the top. Funny that sticks out as a memory, I can clearly see myself outside in our backyard underneath the umbrella, me coloring away, my mother coming out and commenting. And yet all the other coloring days, all the other times, are just hidden behind the mists.
Outdoor: The street I grew up on was very quiet, not much traffic, so it was great for games "in the road". When I was quite young, from about 5 years old to 8, we had several kids on our street and we had changing allegiances. Yes, we argued with each other, claimed alliances, broke up alliances. Floods of tears, "I'll never play with him/her again". But the mothers soothed things over and soon we were back together. When those types of “wars” weren’t going on and we were all friends, we played Hide n Seek around the neighborhood (and in the big abandoned field two blocks away with all manner of dangerous things like abandoned cars and fridges and goodness only knows what), Stand All where one of us threw a ball up in the hair and called someone else’s name out, they ran up to catch it and, when they caught it they shouted “Stand All” and we all froze. Then the person chose someone to roll the ball toward. If it hit the person’s foot, that person was ”It” and the game started again. We also played a game called Statues, the purpose of which I can’t remember except, like Stand All, we would all freeze into weird positions. We played baseball until someone hit the ball through our bathroom window and that was the end of that. With my girl friends I played princesses (and sometimes with a willing younger boy) with my sister’s dresses. It’s a wonder she ever forgave me, I ruined quite a few of her nice formal dresses but, in my defense, my mother let me do it. That was always my defense--"Mom said I could." Ten years' age difference, I totally understand now why my sister resented me. I also used my father’s jackets so someone could play the groom at our pretend weddings but I always used the older ones, the ones that hung in the cedar closet in the basement.
We roller skated, skipped, jump roped. In the winter we built forts out of the huge piles of snow in our yards, slid down them, enhanced said forts with the icicles that we would knock down from our roofs with broomsticks. My dad made an ice rink in our backyard until he found out in the Spring that it ruined the grass.
My parents bought me a small pool and we cooled off in the hot summer, played water games. Again, a slight mishap when my mother allowed us to use detergent to make bubbles and it ruined the grass. No more detergent.
And then a big outdoor swimming pool was built in our neighborhood and we would ride our bikes over to spend our afternoons. My mother would give me 10 cents for a Dairy Queen cone on my way home or a quarter for a sundae.
In the winter the city had public ice rinks so we would carry our skates to the rinks and change in small heated huts, leaving our boots inside. We played Crack the Whip on the rink, landing in snowbanks if we were the ends. My ankles were always weak so my mother bought me these funny leather ankle supports, which helped. I begged my parents for skating lessons but no dice. They didn’t go for ballet lessons either, don’t know why. So I made up my own dance routines down in our basement rec room, twirling away in front of the TV while Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly movies played. Sometimes, because the movies weren't on demand of course, I would just put a record on and dance to the music.
I had a good childhood, a secure one although I didn't realize the security part until I grew up and realized what insecurity was like. But I think it was the memory of that security, what it looked like and, later in life, appreciating what it took to get it, that enables me to be here on a hot Sunday in Arizona, sitting in my air conditioned home, typing up my story on a laptop, food and drink in the refrigerator. Something else to thank my father for.
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