My Day
For me, it started bothering me about forty years ago
when we purchased our oldest son, three years old at the time, a big wheel
trike for Christmas. That spring as I
watched him racing around in the driveway about four times faster than I used
to be able to get my tricycle to go, I began to be just a bit jealous about the
advances they had made in toys from what we had in my day. I remember that peddling my trike was a lot
of work, while Jake’s big wheel looked like a blast. If I could’ve fit I would have rode it myself
after he went to bed. Now a new
generation is resurfacing those feelings.
We just returned home from spending the morning and
early afternoon with our daughter and her two children – our youngest
grandchildren. The morning gave me pause
to consider how different life is for children of today than it was in my
childhood.
Michelle and I have membership at the Green Bay
Botanical Garden. Two of the privileges
of membership is that you can get free day passes for guests, and this garden
also has a large section designed specifically for children. Not in my day. When I was young, in this same town, there
was no concept even of a public garden.
If you wanted flowers you darn well planted them yourself in your own
yard. No one would have dreamed about
paying money to be allowed into someone’s yard to see what they planted. And those people who did invest time, money
and effort into their own flower gardens got along just fine with tulips,
daffodils, some zinnias, petunias, and maybe a rose or two. They didn’t need literally hundreds of
varieties of plants and flowers thank you very much. And back in my day, if the adults in your
life wanted to spend hours doing boring things like look at a bunch of flowers,
there was no place to go and play. You
had to stay right there and be bored; boredom builds character.
Gardens in my day were utilitarian. Perhaps people grew vegetable gardens, so
they could enjoy fresh food in the late summer and can the surplus to help feed
the family through the lean winter months.
Very few people gardened simply for show, and I never heard of anyone
gardening so children could play in them.
We were usually shooed out of the garden because we were either clumsily
trampling something, or we were over-sampling the produce.
You can tell that you are getting near the children
section of the botanical garden when you spot the giant insects that line both
sides of the path. An 8-foot praying
mantis is on the left and two-foot-long bees swarm a hive to the right. Kids today don’t even have the good sense to
be scared of giant insects. In my day we
would have been sent into a panic if confronted with such creatures. My three-year-old grandson, Danny, giggles as
he climbs onto a six-foot grasshopper.
In my day the big slide in the park was maybe twelve
feet high. It was straight and was made
of steel that warmed up in the summer sun to somewhere in the neighborhood of
9,000 degrees. The scorching metal
helped you be painfully aware of just how much of your upper leg your cutoff
shorts covered. We had to climb a ladder
that always made transitioning from standing to sitting on the slide a bit more
than tricky. It seemed that several of
us fell from the top of the ladder every summer. No one did a safety study; no one shut the
slide down. If someone fell off and
broke their arm we were all warned to “Be More Careful!”
The slide in this children’s garden has a wide
staircase with a handrail climbing up to the top. The slide is a tube that by design prevents
direct sunlight. The path down makes
several twisting turns. In my day we
were not allowed to have that much fun on one turn.
The big level play deck is covered with a special play
surface that provides some cushion and a protective surface. In my day you learned to slow down or risk
scrapping the skin off of your hands and knees.
These kids today are soft; they don’t know what it means to bleed as a
price for play.
It was a sunny hot day so we took the kids to the
splash pad. Now, in my day, if there was
a nearby creek, you only got wet if you accidently slipped and fell in. And, any kind of accidental wetness usually resulted in a scolding, or worse. Or perhaps you were allowed to turn on the
hose in the yard with a lawn sprinkler attached. We took turns jumping through the water; it
took about half an hour to get mostly wet.
By that time a mud hole started to form in the grass and it was time to
shut the water off. Today, parents
actually bring swimsuits to change their children into and the splash pad
offers several sprinkler-like and several openings where water jets 15 feet in
the air. The water gushes to
pre-programmed variations in height and pressure non-stop. Again, the children run around on a cushioned
clean surface that prevents bruises and scrapes. Today’s children don’t know how to make their
own fun.
For the most part I don’t waste time wishing I was
young again. I am mostly content with
how my life is playing out. But I have
to admit that, when it comes to play, back in my day just perhaps wasn’t the
best day.
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
Photo by Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash
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