Késsinnimek - Roots - Racines

CAUTION: CHILDREN AT PLAY

by 
                            Louise Dubrule

In anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, the latest Toys R Us catalog is bigger than the phone book for Richford, Vermont. The selections boggle the mind, and I’m left to wonder about what we played with (or at). For sure, we didn’t have much in the way of store-bought items, but I honestly don’t remember ever saying “I’m bored” or “There’s nothing to do”, except maybe two or three times.

True, there were gender-specific toys. Girls played with dolls, and I certainly had my share ranging from homemade rag dolls, yarn dolls for which you could make dresses without sewing, and one store-bought doll. That one had a mohair wig and she said ‘mama’ and shut her eyes when I laid her down. Otherwise, dolls didn’t do anything on their own. Boys played with trucks and cars, just as they do today, and if they were feeling generous, they let girls play too.

Outdoor games occupied much of our free time. It wasn’t hard to round up friends for Hide and Seek, Tag, Steal the Base, Capture the Flag, Red Light/Green Light, or Kick the Can. We relived the Saturday matinees with Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Sometimes it was something called ‘Statues.’ The person who was IT swung the others by one arm, one at a time, and when he let go, the person had to fall in a funny pose with a funny face…and hold it until all the others had been swung and struck their stances. IT chose the best pose and face, and that person became IT.

The vacant lots were gathering places for pickup games of baseball or softball, and it didn’t matter if there were just a couple of people on each team. Sometimes somebody showed up at the vacant lot with a couple of real horseshoes and a different game was on. Other times we took tin cans from the garbage bags at home, smashed the cans with our feet until they curled around our shoes and those became ‘horse shoes’ as we clomped on cement surfaces. The best ‘horse shoes’ were made with the empty motor oil cans that we obtained at the garages or filling stations. The important point here was to be sure you weren’t wearing your Sunday shoes.

Girls gathered on the sidewalk, and a length of clothesline became a jump rope. You needed two people to swing the rope while someone did the jumping to a rhyme. If there were only two of you, it was easy enough to tie the rope to a tree and take turns swinging and jumping. The rhymes weren’t written down, but somehow everybody knew them. One had a little tune and required you to perform actions while jumping. It went: “Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around; teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground; teddy bear, teddy bear, tie your shoe; one, two, three skidoo”…and the jumper jumped out. Another began “Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to kiss her fellow. How many kisses did she give him?” and the jumper went as long as she could before missing, while the others counted. Another one counting one started with “Not last night but the night before, ten little Indians came a-knocking at my door. I got up to let them in and then they began to sing. How many songs did they sing?” If you were really coordinated, you could ‘jump in’ while the rope was being swung, and the skilled ones could jump in tandem.

My best friend Alice Faye and I played a game that we called Sevens. It required a dusty pink rubber ball that we bought at Gilman’s Ben Franklin 5 and 10 for less than twenty-five cents. In a pinch, we could use a cast-off tennis ball, but it just wasn’t the same. The idea was to throw the ball against the side of the house in a prescribed order of different throws. After the basic seven, a movement was added to each throw: clap of hands, stomping foot, turn around, a clap and a stomp, two claps, etc. Was possible to do all seven throws through all the additions? We never found out, for when you missed, you had to start all over at the beginning at your next turn. My Mama, ever patient, never complained about the thumping against the clapboards or the porch floor.

If someone had a piece of chalk, hopscotch patterns covered the sidewalk and they stayed until it rained. The sidewalk was the place of choice for roller skates, and because the skates adjusted to your size with a key (that you carried on a piece of yarn around your neck) they were shared with friends. It was even fun for you and a friend to each have one and you could race to the corner. (I’ll bet I had a band aid or two on my knees until I was in the seventh grade.)

While girls jumped rope, boys were playing mumbledy peg with their jackknives. Moe talks about cutting willow branches and whittling whistles from them, and he became proficient with a slingshot made from a forked stick and a strip cut from a discarded tire inner tube. Many boys had BB guns, notably Red Ryder air rifles, and when they weren’t looking for squirrels, they shot at targets or the occasional road sign. Model airplanes were made from balsa wood and carefully covered with tissue paper. Moe also remembers a group of boys putting on shows, complete with costumes, in Mullins’ barn.

Boys and girls alike played marbles. You could draw a line in the dirt and shoot to see who came closest. To play ‘potsie’ you dug a hole in the dirt with the heel of your shoe and then established a base line to shoot from. You put your marble on the line and sent it toward the pot with your thumb and forefinger, or you rolled the marble with a gentle throw. It was desirable to hit an opponent’s marble out of the range of the pot, and you were lucky, indeed, if you owned an extra-large marble called a ‘bunker’ for it was powerful enough to knock the regular sized ones farther away. The winner was the one who got all his marbles in the pot first….and the winner took all those in the pot. It was possible to show up with four or five marbles and leave the afternoon’s match with a pocketful.

Marbles showed up at school for recess time, as did jacks. Other recess games included Simon Says, Red Rover, London Bridge, Ring Around the Rosy, and Farmer in the Dell. Another ‘choosing’ game began “All around in London town, the windows are made of glass” and the person chosen had her name paired with a boy’s name….usually somebody geeky; and in the response she had to sing a verse that ended with “for he’s the boy for me.” It could have been humiliating to be the last chosen to join the group in many of these games, but recess didn’t last long enough for someone to be the last.

Of course there were store-bought amusements. Dig Daignault down the street from me had the whole Lincoln Log set that came in a big can and that was good for several hours. He also had Tinker Toys and a box of wooden blocks that included arches and columns. The most fun was combining all three sets and inventing something truly special.

Monopoly was good for a whole rainy afternoon. A simple deck of cards led to games of Go-Fish, War, Solitaire, Double Solitaire, or Rummy. There was always a deck of Old Maid cards around too. Checkers skills were honed so that we could play with adults and occasionally win, though I never beat Papa. Coloring books were dissected so several people could color together, and Crayola actually had a crayon called ‘flesh.’ Jigsaw puzzles were set up on card tables and it was an honor to put in the very last piece. Parcheesi was another popular board game but nobody on our street owned one. Mama drew us a reasonable facsimile on the back of an old oil cloth and we used buttons for game pieces.

Every household had a cigar box of broken crayons, pencil stubs, and LePage’s mucilage in glass bottles with a yellow rubber top that had a slit in it. Armed with this equipment and paper, we could accomplish a lot of things. We made paper airplanes, decorated them, and had flying contests. Kites were formed with sticks and newspaper, and the tails were as long as we wanted. We made grids on the paper and played endless games of Tic-Tac-Toe with ‘the cat’ winning most of the games. Grids were necessary for Battleship, too, but not for Hangman . Actually this activity helped us with spelling without our being aware of it. There were several of us “Canucks” who faced total immersion to learn English, and while the others laughed at our pronunciation of English words, we laughed when they tried to imitate our French sounds as the ‘eu’ sound in the word ‘bleu’ (blue). I don’t remember any hard feelings on either side.

As today, girls were preoccupied with clothes, and to that end we had paper dolls. If we didn’t have a store-bought book of them, the Sears Roebuck catalog provided ladies in slips. We glued these on cardboard, cut them out and dressed them from the pages of the catalog. As we got older, we designed and colored the outfits ourselves. We were able to cut several families of paper dolls from one catalog. Thirty years later I introduced our daughters to this idea, and they found it as enjoyable as I once had. They even added to the concept by playing ‘hospital’ with the paper dolls, transplanting limbs and performing ‘operations.’ Some of these sessions lasted several days.

Other quiet pastimes included braiding with plastic strips to make lanyards; and if an adult pounded finishing nails into one end of a wooden thread spool, we were able to knit long ‘worms’ from yarn scraps. Did we ever do anything worthwhile with them?

The seasons led to particular activities. In the spring we caught tadpoles in jars and tried to keep them long enough for them to turn into frogs. Wild daisies were woven into chains to make necklaces or crowns. You could do the same thing with dandelions, but their sap stained your hands. We spent plenty of time lying on our backs on the lawn, watching the moving clouds, discovering shapes in them, and then we rolled down the sloping lawns until we were too dizzy to stand. In the summer evenings we caught lightning bugs in jars to watch them glow, but our mothers made us let them go because we didn’t know what they ate. Winter meant sledding, ice skating, snowball fights, snow forts, and snow angels. If you didn’t have a sled, an inner tube worked well, as did a garbage can cover or a cardboard box flattened out.

In looking back, what I always wanted was a big box of 48 Crayola crayons, but the biggest one I ever had was a box of 24. That must be why I made sure that our girls each got that big box every year for Christmas. They let me color with them in their new coloring books when the crayons were still new and pointed, and that was just as good. When Moe was about fifty, he revealed that he had always longed for an erector set, something out of reach of most people in our little town, and we made sure he finally owned one. These days our grandson Cohen plays with it with Pépère’s supervision and advice. Cohen seems to have the skill to harness his imagination too. A big cardboard box became a pirate ship and he enlisted the whole family to help him make all the tools of the trade every good pirate needs: hat, eye patch, cutlass, parrot, treasure map, and a little chest of coins. When he was here for a visit in September, he spent many hours creating fantastic creatures with a package of colored pipe cleaners, a little bag of colored pom poms, a bottle of glue and a pair of wire snips.

Perhaps the secret of our carefree childhood was the fact that it lasted longer. There was no pre-school or kindergarten: we started school when we turned six. Thanks to all the comic books we traded and real books we checked out of the library, most of us could read a little before we started school. We lived in a small town where we were free to roam our neighborhood so we could meet all the children, and we had the time to just be a child. The rest was up to imagination and inspiration. We’d never heard of Toys R Us.

 

Késsinnimek - Roots - Racines
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Created 1 Feb 2003