toys...

Over the past week or so I've seen a post about simpler times on a few friends' Facebook pages.  It was about drinking out of the hose when you were hot in the summer.  I remember those days well.  You didn't want to go in the house to get a drink of water for fear that you might have to stay there... You wanted to be outside because the sun was shining and you were having fun.  I remember how I hated to be called in just because it was "getting dark".  I was still having fun!

I was thinking about this, too.  If kids don't play outside, it's more than likely not the kids' fault these days.  We live in a scary time, with drugs, gang violence, people that prey on children... those things happened when I was young, I'm sure, but not to the degree of frequency they do nowadays.  Outside might not be the safest place to be these days.  And, when did parks become hangouts for weirdos?

Going to the park used to be fun.  Murray park had THE coolest things to do like slide down the old cement irrigation ditch.  It was a poor kid's water slide before such a thing was invented.  They had the best playground, too in the "new" part of the park.

Then too, the toys have changed.  Video games, especially.  I still have my Atari 2600.  I bought it when I was sixteen and working at Grand Central.  I had a ton of games for it and it killed some time.  It was more fun though, playing it at the electronics department on the third floor of ZCMI after school on the way home.  Once I had it the luster seemed to wear off after a while...

Those were the days.

My wife and I one Christmas a few years ago were lamenting over the toys we really wanted and never received.  My wife has a Cabbage Patch doll now and I have one of the very few Tonka trucks I always wanted but never received for Christmas.  It's in a closet downstairs.

I also have something else the wife gave me for Christmas.  It's on top of the mirror in the bedroom.  It's a stick.  Just a stick.

When I was a boy, though, it was sooooo much more.  It was a gun.  With some string you could make a pretend bow and arrow.  It was a sword for swordfights.  It was a magic wand.;  a pretend fishing pole, just about anything you needed it to be with a little imagination.  Sticks, marbles, kites, matchbox cars and Tonka trucks were all part of my childhood.

Times change, people change.  When we lament the loss of those days, we need to remember that kids don't change... they're a by-product of the world their parents create for them.  They see the world they're shown.  The one we as parents created for them; the one our parents created for us.

I think about kids a lot these days.  Mine will be soon at the age where they'll be thinking of starting families of their own.  I watch as someone very dear to me struggles with the challenges of being a single parent and I wish she would make different choices because I know what it's like to be in a home where your mom works all the time.  I think often of the world we've created for our children which more and more, takes mothers out of the home and into the workplace.  I have to stop and wonder if what we've created for ourselves is worth the price we pay for it.

Drinking out of a hose is a throwback to days gone by and a more carefree lifestyle.  It seems to me though, too, that the rule and not the exception to it in those days was that mom was at home, too.  Just in case we did get sick from drinking from the hose...