Have you ever taken time to reflect on the past and remembered the good times spent just being a kid? The summer months are full of opportunities to just be a kid (no age restrictions). This is a time when kids can get creative and find their own fun.
I distinctly remember that two weeks before school was out, they were coming to me and saying, “I’m bored, what can I do?” The answer was always the same, do what I did, figure it out, entertain yourselves. At that time, I was working nights so I spent quite a bit of time with the boys. I guess they thought I should be the “program director” as well as their dad.
The old saying, “what goes around comes around,” has become a truism, because now their kids have at times uttered those famous words, which usually happens soon after school is out. I sometimes think that it just took a while to adjust to all that free time. I guess that I was the same way when I was growing up, except that I knew asking my folks for playing directions would be an exercise in futility.
The last thing on their mind was figuring out what I should be doing for the day. I have to say that kids can get pretty creative when left up to using their own imagination.
I really do believe that a lot of today’s parents try to over-organize their kid’s activities and not give them the time to just be kids doing what kids do in the summer. How many times have you driven past one of our play parks and seen a bunch of kids playing a pick-up baseball game? When I go for my neighborhood walk in the morning, it seems like the sound of kids playing outdoors has been replaced by a whole pack of barking neighbor dogs.
This makes me wonder, what kids do for entertainment these days. Is it video games and TV or the internet that keeps them inside and not out playing? When my boys were small they would be up and outside as soon as possible, looking for one or more of their neighbor friends to hang out with. Playing baseball in the backyard or street hockey in the driveway were two of their more popular pastimes. They built a tree house in the backyard and that’s where they would spend a lot of their time.
These were just some of the things that they occupied their time with. Sitting in the house watching TV didn’t seem that important to them. When I look back on my childhood it was all about being outdoors and making your own entertainment.
Occasionally, I have driven past a field of freshly baled hay and it reminded me of those days. I can still remember walking across a field on a hot sunny day after the bales had been put in the barn and seeing grasshoppers and an occasional frog jumping. There is nothing like the smell of a freshly mown hayfield, and even after it has been baled and put away, it still has a certain smell about it.
It doesn’t seem possible that the fair is not that far away. As a kid this was always the week that I looked forward to all summer. But, it was also semi-sweet. The fair was fun and what I’d been saving my mowing and paper route money for, but in the back of my mind, I knew that after the fair summer would soon be over. School was once again looming in the background.
I’ve mentioned before about how my friend Pat Smith and I would start checking out the fairgrounds about a week ahead of time. We’d look to see if there were any new buildings or if there had been a new paint job applied to any existing ones. Pat always liked horses so we’d have to check out the horse barns, which back then had year-round occupants.
My dad always had horses and there was a time when he kept his horses at the fairgrounds all year round, but he said he’d rather keep them someplace where they could have a pasture to run in.