At the risk of sounding like an old man, I have realized there is a great difference in how the youth of today entertain themselves and how the youth of my generation did so.
One big difference is that we mostly played outdoors. It was safer to do so back then. Many were the mornings when my mother pushed me out the door with instructions to “Go outside and play and don’t be running in and out of this house.” She may have even locked the screen door behind me. These days she might be arrested for such behavior. She often told me I was not going to sit in the house all day. Sometimes she said I was getting on her nerves. I remember thinking that I didn’t even know where her nerves were, or what they were, so how could I possibly be getting on them. After I became a parent myself, I understood exactly what she meant.
If I made the mistake of saying, “I can’t find anything to do,” without fail Mama would say, “I’m going to find you something to do.” I knew I wasn’t going to like what she had in mind. Playing outside, fishing, swimming or even doodling for doodle bugs was much more fun than silking corn or shelling peas!
She would say, “Now go on outside and play and I’ll call you when it’s time to come eat.” No, she didn’t mean she would call me on my cell phone. We had never heard of such things. I did have a pair of battery-powered walkie talkies once, but they only worked occasionally, and never if the other person was more than a few feet away. Mama could stand on the front porch and holler loud enough for me to hear her, so she didn’t need a phone or walkie talkie. If I was not close enough to hear her when she called, I had better have gotten permission to be that far away. I guess that’s why she would say, “Don’t make me have to call you twice.” It was a probably a good thing we didn’t have cell phones because no one answers them on the first call. Mama would not have been happy…and then I would not have been happy.
It was much easier to play outdoors back them because most of our playthings did not have to be plugged up, charged up or even need batteries. Today’s youth mostly have electronic games. They have them on their computers or tablets, but probably more so on their cell phones. When I was a kid, about the only electronic game I ever had that we played indoors was an electric football game. No, it was not computerized. It was a flat tin board painted like a football field that vibrated to move little plastic football players downfield…maybe. Now we have computerized video football that looks like a real game. We didn’t have Madden NFL video games, we had the real Madden coaching in the NFL, and we played with a real football in a real backyard. A young fellow asked me, “Did you not have a PlayStation?” I replied, “I sure did. My playstation was my yard, pond, creek and woods.” We did have fortnite back then. We built a nice little wooden fort down by Ivy Creek and we spent many nights there camping and fighting off enemy soldiers.
I must admit that the World Wide Web does have some fun and interesting things to see and play, but even more so does the Wide World Outdoors. Let’s go outside!
Bill King can be reached at bkpreach@yahoo.com or 334-728-5514 (office).
