Back in the day, when kids used to play outside until sundown, I had many adventures. Thinking about them now reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode where the senior citizens revert to kid age when they sneak out to play ‘kick the can’. The games were simple and used more imagination than actual props.

I could spend hours in the desert in back of my house building a clubhouse with tumbleweeds or searching for “treasure” with an old stick. Honestly, I’m surprised I never ran into a rattlesnake with as much mucking around as I did back there. There was a tiny church at the end of the lot and marching to the church seemed like such a long trek as a kid venturing away from the backyard boundary but it was really a 3 minute walk.

When the monsoons filled up the ditch in the back, I sent anything that could float off to the high seas. I’m pretty sure I sent a bug or two down the river, I imagined a tinny, high pitched insect scream as it clung for dear life to the chunk of wood. Or, I’d cross over from one spot and back from another. I am so grateful I didn’t get swept away and drowned.

The area behind the barbecue pit was my schoolroom. For that, I used a TON of props and stocked it with paper, a stapler, scissors, books, and anything else I could swipe from the house. I was always the teacher and forced my poor friend through lessons for as long as I could hold her hostage. Or, it was a bank where I used all of the deposit slips I had pocketed from the real bank.

I spent many summers in a car repair shop keeping myself occupied by cleaning spark plugs or mixing oils and liquids in an attempt to discover a magic potion. Seeing as I’m sure that some of those were surely combustible or, at the very least, incompatible, it is beyond comprehension that I somehow managed to avoid blowing up the building. I used to love to ride the lift in the car being repaired then climb my way down without killing myself. I still love the smell of any repair shop I walk into. They all smell exactly the same.

I didn’t escape my childhood unscathed though. My worst injury was caused by a foot race. Three of us were racing on the sidewalk when one of the girls and I broke out in the lead and she tripped. As she fell, her legs bounced up and entangled with my legs as I tried to pass. We tumbled to the ground in a mass of skinny arms and legs. The girl in back thought she’d join us by jumping atop of us. In an instant, my arm felt like it was in a hole and was surprised to see that there was only flat ground when we finally got up. It turns out my arm was broken at the elbow. To this day, I have a weird bend in my arm because it wasn’t set properly.

My kids didn’t do half the adventuring I did and I’m sure the current kids do even less. It’s a different world for sure and I’m not saying it’s any better or worse, just different. Sometimes I wish my kids had experienced a childhood more like mine but more times I’m glad they didn’t. They seem to be doing just fine and I wouldn’t change that.

Instead, I’ll just bore and mystify them with my stories like the one where I spent hours setting up a box and stick and waited patiently to pull the string to capture a bird with a line of seed.

What can I say? I didn’t have an iPhone and Bugs Bunny was a huge influence! I may not know what the fuck a “social influencer” is but I’m pretty sure I can catch my own dinner in a post apocalyptic world.