Playing is what kids do when they are little. I was no different.
Right outside our back door in Laramie we had a small hill on the lawn side of a narrow cement sidewalk leading up to the house. For some reason (that a kid wouldn’t understand) it never had any grass growing on it. It seemed the perfect place to play in the dirt. My brother Frank had a collection of marbles and a few small cars or toys. We used that dirt pile to create a fantasy of roads, hills, tunnels and whatever else we could think of. Maybe it was a town or a battlefield (the war was on in Europe and the Pacific), I don’t quite remember, but I spent hours of my childhood playing out there in that dirt.
When I was five or six I started playing with dolls. Mother had Santa give me a new doll every Christmas, and, one year I got a canvas doll buggy. When the Phillips girls next door were allowed to play, (how does a kid understand that their mother is an alcoholic?) we would bundle up our little “babies” and take them around the block in the buggy just like real mothers do. I remember playing outside on cold days and worrying about keeping the dolls warm bundled up in their blankets.
Most summer days included a trip to the old Stanton School playground where we got our elementary education. It was only three blocks from our house and that was nothing. There was a big old metal slide, a set of swings and an old merry-go-round. The ground was all dirt and rocks but we seldom had our shoes on. The merry-go-round was the roughest. If you got on it and someone was pushing (or pulling) it fast, you had to leap off to save yourself. It was probably dangerous, but we didn’t know it or care. The metal slide was burning hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. We sat on waxed paper going down to make it slick and fast. One time in the winter, I put my tongue on the cold metal on the slide handle and it stuck. When I pulled it off, I learned not to ever do that again.
Later childhood play included lots of roller skating in the summer and ice skating in the winter. I was usually frustrated with the roller skates because they clamped onto my shoes and required a key (which I had to find) to tighten them around my shoes. They also adjusted in the center to make them longer or shorter. I saw a box of these old roller skates last week in the Collectible Department at Deseret Industries but had no desire to even look at them.
I was a pretty good skater but my feet just kept growing out of the skates. The sidewalks around the block left something to be desired. We had a vacant lot at the end of the street with no sidewalk, so that was a trial. In other places the old concrete was cracked or uneven but when the weather was nice, who cared?
The ice skating rink was at City Park on the other side of town. About once a week after school on winter days, Frank and I walked down to the rink carrying our skates. It was an old wooden structure with a small warm-up room where you could put your feet next to an old wood-burning stove to get them warm. I liked skating to the music and we played “crack the whip” with other kids. It was usually dark when we left, and sometimes Mother picked us up, but mostly we walked home. Home was always a welcome sight to me.
Frank and I both had paper routes until we were mabe13 and 15 years old, and at some point I was able to get a bicycle. My most vivid memory of bicycle riding is peddling to the University of Wyoming campus. In the summer the students were few, so it was lots of fun to ride up and down the cement paths between buildings, especially by the old “peanut pond” and Ivinson and 9th streets. It wasn’t far from the Church, so I stopped for a drink or just to see if anyone I knew was there. The Campus Shop was across the street and they had pop and candy. I had my own paper route money and was able to buy myself treats. We had lots of freedom to go wherever we wanted to on our bikes.
My interest in decorating started to show up when, one Christmas, Santa left me a dollhouse. It was wooden with an open back and an upstairs and downstairs. The living room had a fuzzy floor but everything else was painted. It probably came from Montgomery Wards where Santa had his Toyland in the basement in Laramie. The dollhouse had some furniture, but I can’t remember much about it. I remember how dusty the rooms got and I loved to clean it all up and arrange the furniture as nicely as I could. The dollhouse never had people, which I found very sad. I played with it until I was 12 or 13 when we moved to the Sully house. I remember packing up the furniture but, somehow, the dollhouse didn’t make the move with us. I was growing up.
I climbed trees in our yard, played pretend, went to afternoon movies on Saturday, listened to the radio, practiced piano, made scrapbooks, built tents out of blankets in the back yard, and, played games in the street with the neighborhood kids. Playing is an important part of childhood. It didn’t matter to me if it was dirt or dolls, skates or bicycles; my job was to find something to do that was interesting and fun. And, I did.
No comments:
Post a Comment