Do you remember long, slow summer days that meandered and stretched on a gentle, endless path? Do you remember making your own fun and recruiting others to join?
I used to sit on my neighbor’s porch, at the edge of a sandbox that remained long after the kids of the house had any use for it, sifting warm sand with my toes, waiting for neighborhood kids to appear. No texting, just subliminal messages sent through the rippling heat that games were afoot.
We drew chalk lines on the driveway for hopscotch and shifted to four square when our numbers grew. We played with a Pinky, the best bouncing ball ever made.
When enough regulars arrived, we launched into SPUD. I remember throwing a ball in the air, players scattering, and yelling, “SPUD!” but the exact rules escape me, and I didn’t recognize the game I read about when I looked it up. Maybe we played our own version, rules honed within our community of kids. I don’t remember who knew what first, or how we learned any of the games we played on those long summer afternoons.
I do know it felt like we invented fun. And our fun felt important and big.
I learned that the power of a kid and a ball attract possibility. This lesson was repeated over and over when I was grown, living in New York City, and would crawl through a hole in the fence surrounding a school playground to kick a soccer ball around. As soon as the “bop” of a good pass ricocheted through the air, neighborhood kids would show up and we’d have a game.
Who played freeze tag? Tunnel tag? Tunnel tag added a dimension of risk to the old standard. If you were frozen, someone crawling through your legs would unfreeze you. It was a feat of agility and timing, but it was a disaster to get tagged while you were trying to free a friend. It left you both stuck, one in the tunnel and one as the tunnel, with no hope of redemption.
I don’t remember how we decided who was “it” next.
TV tag was hard because we had to name shows, no repeating, in alphabetical order. I’m not sure if anyone ever started with “Three’s Company” or what happened if they did.
We played sardines and learned how many kids can fit under a porch, in the bushes or up a tree. My adult brain questions if it was “winning” to wriggle in the dirt and smush in with sweaty friends — no laughing, not even loud breathing that could give our position away. If we hid too well, the seekers got bored and shifted to another game while the sardines overheated, our closeness amplified by our inflated sense of cleverness. A shout of “Ollie, ollie, in come free” would bring us out of hiding, sweat-streaked, dirt ground into our skin, and victorious.
I never mastered double Dutch and I’d like to give it another try. It feels like something I should have been good at. But, if my current Hula-Hoop skills are any indication of what it’s like to retry childhood games, it’s a nonstarter. (Recent garage cleaning led to a very, very short Hula-Hoop break and an addition to the Goodwill pile.)
I learned how to ride a bike one summer in Ohio when my dad was on sabbatical, teaching and doing advanced study. I rode around the concrete quads of student housing on three wheels, then two with training wheels. Then, one day, with my dad jogging behind me, he let go of my seat and my thrill and power soared, propelling me on my first solo flight. I didn’t understand it then, but my bike was my key to freedom. Later it got me to the public pool and the penny candy store when I was goofing off all summer while my parents worked.
We played chase jump rope, running into the twirling rope for one jump, then running out again to make figure eights around the twirlers. I was uncatchable, jumping the rope without breaking stride, and I learned that nobody wants to be the chaser or the twirler all the time.
Nobody wants to play an unwinnable game.
When it got dark, we played the game of all games: spotlight tag. We’d shriek and scatter, avoiding the flashlight rays.
These were the years when I could run for days and when I thought being water-adjacent counted as a shower. One evening, I showed up in the kitchen ready for bed and my mother led me back to the bathroom, where she scrubbed my arms with a soapy washcloth. While dirt circled the drain, I screamed. She was washing off my tan.
Summer didn’t end with school’s start, because we had blue skies and recess and more friends and games to play. One year my class made red rover a little more serious by switching out the tag for a tackle. The principal gathered us for a talking-to and asked us why we couldn’t “just be normal.”
We knew, even then, this was just one thing in a series of dumb things we’d do. So we turned red rover into manhunt, complete with jail and a system of buying clemency by completing dares.
We knew time was on our side, slowly rolling out ahead of us, and our creativity and fun was important and big.
Excuse me, I’ve got to go save the Hula-Hoop.
