I was watching my kids play in the courtyard yesterday with Athletic Boy and Sidekick. Athletic Boy was doing mind-blowingly fast circuits on his scooter on the path that surrounds the grass. Sidekick was attempting to race but kept getting shoved off the road, Car Race Style. My kids just stood on the sidelines, being the audience. Wow! Wow! Look how fast he goes mommy, look! Look!
Yeah. Wow. Exciting. Like I’ve never seen a dude go fast on a scooter before. Excuse me if I don’t bow in homage. It’s cold out.
I didn’t say.
“So, what are you playing?” I said.
“We’re watching Athletic Boy,” said Trombone. Like duh.
Athletic Boy and Sidekick (age 5.5 and 6.5, respectively) have three games: race the scooters. Hide and Seek. Wrestling. Once they’re done playing those games, they usually bug the shit out of each other and get separated and sent to their respective homes. Yesterday was no different. In the meantime, though, I had to supervise the wrestling to make sure Trombone didn’t get his neck broken, and stick around outside during hide and seek to make sure no one lured Fresco out into the cul de sac. And while I was supervising, I was thinking about my favourite games as a kid.
Granted, I only remember the ones after a certain age, when I was old enough to play unsupervised with my friends and we made our own fun. Prior to that I believe I made a lot of mud pies, played “circus” (we pretended my puppy was a lion and we were taming him), and I remember spending a lot of time sitting on the front steps of the house, waving at cars and getting excited when the people in the cars waved back. Yes, that’s the whole game. I miss back when.
But top three games for the middle school years:
Spying:
Like many kids I took “Harriet the Spy” to heart and sat perched in the big-armed tree just outside my gate, watching people go by and writing things down in my little notebook.
The Glamorous Movie Star Game:
I think this was around grade 6 or 7? One of us pretended to be Elizabeth Taylor. One pretended to be Marilyn Monroe*. I believe the third, if there was a third friend present, had to be a reporter. And then we staged elaborate intrigue scenarios on the top floor of my house, which had three rooms and several spacious closets; one movie star would disappear but leave notes behind as clues to her whereabouts. I believe the reporter had to find the movie stars. Using glamorous accents was important.
* I have no idea how or why I became obsessed with Marilyn Monroe at a certain age, but I did. I didn’t watch any of her films but I read her biography and I thought she was just fabulous.
Hopping Asteroids
At the front of my elementary school there are nine trees spaced a few feet apart from one another (and a tenth, at the opposite end of the block). In 6th grade, we were studying the solar system in science and one day at recess my friends and I decided that the nine trees each represented one of the planets. Hopping Asteroids was a game of tag / musical chairs, where each player started on her “home” tree (mine was Mars) and then attempted to hop to another tree before the person who was “it” could tag her. You had to hop on one leg, though. That was the tricky part.
The tenth tree we named “Planet X” and also “The Mustard Tree” because it had little bits that it dropped that, when you squished them, made a sort of yellow dust. It also had prickly, holly-like leaves. When Hopping Asteroids caused a major rift between me and my best friends, I stopped playing and decided Planet X was a witch’s tree. I cast elaborate spells on my former friends. You had to use the prickly leaves to carve the person’s name into the trunk of the tree, then rub it all over with the yellow dust, then fold up the leaf and stuff it in the ground near the tree trunk. ONLY THEN would your spell come true.
What were your favourite childhood games?
My favorite game for a large portion of my childhood was “school.” I had an old school desk, and my teacher grandmothers would bring me old mimeographed tests/worksheets/quizzes to play with. I’d line all my stuffed animals and dolls up in class, and make them do their work. They’d get in trouble for not having their homework, and one particularly naughty bear spent a lot of time in the corner.
I didn’t have many kids around growing up (except when my cousins would visit), so I obviously found the lamest ways to amuse myself.
Ha ha! Truants, those bears.
When I walked to the end of the garden and climbed the fence, I was in a woods. It’s still there, in the middle of Kitchener, ON.
We played in the woods every summer until my mom died and I moved away, when I was 11. There was a saucer shaped dip somewhere in the middle, and that became our house. Fallen tree branches became walls and doors, couches and chairs. We gathered leaves and pine needles and stuff to become food or cushions. We played house.
Further afield, which we explored as we got older, we found a stand of trees that for some freaky reason, grew sideways for a bit. They grew straight up from the ground, and somewhere around 2 or 3 feet up, they bent and grew parallel to the ground for a bit and then turned to grow straight up again. There were maybe 4 or 6 of them in a group. I still have no clue why they grew that way. But, they were perfect to climb upon and they became horses. We became anyone who might be riding horses: cowboys on the trail, bank or train robbers on the run, settlers heading out west. But I remember that the game never lasted that long – they weren’t comfortable to sit on.
At the end of the street was a field that belonged to a farm further on. Now there are just high-rises where once Max Becker had his farm. We would wander through the field and follow the cows and watch them drinking in the pond which was too shallow and too muddy for anything fun except catching tadpoles.
When summer was coming to an end, I would get my new clothes for school. One thing I got every year was a pair of brown leather shoes. My dad called them brogues. I loved to put them on and dance on the sidewalk leading away from our front porch. Compared to the cheap canvas running shoes of summer, these made a satisfying clack on the sidwalk and for a brief period at the end of the summer, I was a tap dancer.
There’s a tree like that at the park where the New West farmers market meets in the summer. The kids are all over it like monkeys on a banana patch.
I used to love wearing shoes with heels on the front porch because of the tile floor and the echo.
Skipping rope. I remember spending a LOT of time skipping rope. If there were only two of us, we’d tie one end of the skipping rope to a pole so that we could still play. There were a lot of rhymes, which I’ve mostly forgotten. And really impressive kids who could do double dutch (not me).
Aw, now I’m all nostalgic.
My childhood was spent in Northern BC where we had the BIGGEST ant hills ever. I recall them being at least three feet high although they may have been bigger. We used to put on gum boots and run through them in the summer. We also used to jump the ditches (and one I fell in and was covered in mosquito larvae). Most of the games I recall were distinctly buggy.
Wow. Running through anthills sounds really fun…and itchy.
Hide & Seek. Princess Diana’s Wedding. Radio – we’d tape record ourselves interviewing singers then listen to the radio until the appropriate singer came on, press record and presto, we’d have a conversation with Michael Jackson such as Me:”What do you say when you want your brothers to get out of your room?”
MJ: Beat it, beat it.
Took HOURS. My mom must have loved that one because my neighbour and I would play it outside and be out of her hair for entire afternoons.
No kidding! That is an awesome game.
Oh, Harriet the Spy.
My favorite game was Radio Show, which involved me taping interviews with people, or, since people often weren’t available for interview, with puppets.
Rich inner life and all that, was how we spent winters. In the summer we swam all day until the water felt warmer than the air.