Saturday, December 19, 2009
12:40 PM
The Park In Our Backyard
During the summer of my childhood, the Parks & Recreation Department of our city kept our neighborhood park buzzing with fun activity. The wading pool, which was built brand new when I was still a preschooler, was by far, my favorite summertime hangout. You wouldn't think you could have a lot of fun in a foot of water but we did. Initially, the pool hours were 1:00 - 8:00. By the time I was in the 3rd or 4th grade, they had extended the hours so that it was open 10:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. with only an hour lunch break for the lifeguard at noon. Heaven. My friends and I lived in that pool. The park was directly behind my house so I grew up feeling as though the pool and everything else there was mine. It was awesome and during the warm months, I spent as much time in that park as I did in my own house. Until he reached his upper teen years, so did Bernie. The park was our place, and the kids there were our people. We owned. lol
Besides the pool-related activites, the P&R dept. also hired a person (usually senior in high school or early college age) to sit at the park all day every day watching over a huge bag of games with which we neighborhood kids were invited to play. We LOVED that. The city provided all kinds of outdoor games for us and we had a blast learning to play all of them. One summer in particular, we got hooked on a game that we played with the crochet set. It was called "snake" and we played it obsessively.
"Snake" objective:
Place the two crochet stakes at opposite ends of the playing field which could be as small or as large as you wanted it to be.
Everyone chooses a stick and a color-coordinated ball.
All balls are placed on the ground in line with one of the stakes, which was designated as the starting line.
Taking turns, each player tried to push their ball down the field where they were supposed to hit the stake, then turn around and come back to hit the stake that was at the finish line.
Sounds easy enough, right? But the two stakes were far enough away that you couldn't possibly get your ball all the way down to the first stake with only one shot, which meant that everyone's balls would be scattered in the playing field. If one player was getting close to the stake with his ball, then the other players would use their next turn to try to knock his ball way out of the way by sending their own ball sailing into to. So while you were trying to touch base with both stakes, set far apart, your opponents were also trying to do that while ALSO making every attempt to knock your ball out of the running. It was competitive and a lot of fun and my friends and I sometimes played it for hours at a time. We rarely ever used the crochet set to actually play crochet as it was meant to be played. We played "snake" instead and we all agreed that it was a much better game.
In today's world, kids have to have 20 different electronic devices in order to feel adequately entertained. I'm not criticizing them for that. I love technology, too. Still, I hate that my own kids don't know what it's like to have hours of innocent fun in a park with just a crochet set and one foot of water.