....tell me a story...

 "....when I was a kid,..."

When I start in on that, the eye-rolling starts, and their eyes glaze over.  After all, when I was a kid, was like a billion years ago to them, and certainly not relevant in the least!

Someday, they might long for my stories, and find themselves wishing they had listened more carefully.   Someday they might have questions for me that they can no longer ask.  

So since my own kids are tired of my stories, I'll blast a few out here, and if YOU don't like them, you can scroll on past...

Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe....that was my brothers' candy shack.  They actually built a little shed, set it in our front yard, and sold candy bars.  My father would drive all the way over to the drug store that sold those candy bars by the case, and my brothers would nickel and dime their way to new bikes, which probably cost as much then as they do now, because they weren't massed produced in China.  My brothers also had a few paper routes, once when they went to Boy Scouts camp, my sister and I did their paper route for them.  I went along to help them sometimes, there was one house that had free drinks in the garage, cans of lukewarm soda.  Shh, I don't think they were really free.

Once my little brother went missing.  My mother was just about to call the police, when we heard the hooting of a strange owl from the top of the pine tree in the back yard, and there he was, little stinker, watching everyone search for him.

He fell out of a tree in the backyard once, too, hanging upside down, and boom, and was somehow fine.

He and I spent YEARS of our childhood climbing trees.  We also had those metal t-shaped laundry posts, which made for good monkey bars.  We didn't have a swing set, good thing our friends had them.  We did have sandboxes, which were really matching horse shoe pits, with real sand, taken from countless trips to the beach, shh.  Casey and I had our own sandboxes, but sometimes we played in the same one together.

We lived in a neighborhood, and there was always someone to play with.  Our street had a dozen houses on it, just a small street, nice and level, on a ridge, making it fun to ride bikes around the block, which we were allowed to do unsupervised, to our hearts' content.  

There were kickball games with flattened can bases, and jumprope games galore in the street in front of our house.  Hopscotch, roller skates, skateboards...all the time.  We played whole neighborhood games of hide and seek, no one's yard was taboo to hide in.  We "cut through" everyone's yard, and may or may not have tasted a few scallions from Mert's garden.  Mert lived on the corner, and she knew what was going on.  She had had a stroke when she was younger, and she spelled many of the words in her sentences.  She was a nice lady, and we never thought it was mean that we called here M-E-R-T.

Once I fell when I pulling a neighbor kid down the street on a sled, a real sled, with metal runners.  Why was I doing that?  I do not know.  I just remember falling on the pavement and cutting my lip open, and you know how lips bleed, it was very traumatic.  

The stitches in the top of my head when the little boy across the street threw a brick at me, very traumatic as well.  I totally blacked out when it happened.  The worst part was afterward, with that little shaved patch on the top of my head, feeling so ugly and self conscious, and vulnerable...it hurt so badly, and I was afraid someone would bop me or touch it...then in school, I was excused from gym, but had to sit on the sidelines while they played  dodgeball!  Unbelievable.  I thought for sure I would get pelted in the head.  The whole ordeal makes me feel sorry for my little fourth grade self.

We weren't rich people, but we were sharing people.  We weren't allowed to just take an ice cream cone into the front yard, no, we had to share.  If there were other kids out there, my mother would make them cones, too.  You just didn't "eat in front" of anyone.  

We had metal trash cans, used the lids as shields when we played with the hose.

Anyway...Sonja is up and around, and I am now totally distracted...