My Dash: Week 13

My post last week about playing with friends reminded me of some funny games that we made up as kids. One was called "Zero zero".  To play it one person was it and stood on the front porch (also the "jail") and counted to "one o'clock, two o'clock... etc until midnight and then said loudly "midnight zero zero" which meant that they were coming to catch everyone hiding in the yard and try to put them in jail.  The bushes by the mailbox were usually "safe" and everyone tried to get there before getting caught.  Human chains from the "safe" out towards whoever was running towards it were allowed.  Tagging people out of jail was allowed. I can mostly picture us playing this game at dusk on summer nights.

We also had a game that we called "chicken" which was played either on ours and our neighbor's swing sets. The person who was "it" had to close their eyes and try to catch everyone else. Only the person who was it was allowed to let go of the swing set. Everyone else had to be touching the swing set at all times.

On those same two nearby swing sets we also played "berry wars".  Which involved gathering whatever "berries" were on the trees and bushes that season in our sand pails and then throwing them at each other. Usually a girls team  on one swing set and a boys team on the other.

For one summer, I think I was about 11 that year, my mom babysat a girl named Erica and I think a couple of the neighbors.  We played a game called "Bead store" together every day that year.  It involved everyone bringing their favorite beads and buttons. We each set up our own tiny shops. Then we traded each other for what seemed like hours.

We had a series of kiddie pools in our backyard.  I remember the first one was large, but only about 2-3 feet deep.  After awhile we upgraded to a 3-4 foot deep pool that fit on a similar footprint. Marco polo in such a small pool was perfect. We played that and dolphin divers a lot (jumping and diving in the water trying to look like dolphins obviously!).

There was a huge sprawling wooden castle style playground called St Mary's park that had tons of steps, bridges, cubbies and monkey bars.  We loved go there and play a similar kind of tag where you had to always be touching the playground.

I think the best game that we played as kids was one that my brother P and I played a lot, especially on long car rides.  We called it the "what-if" game.   We each tried to think of fun or hard "what-if" question to ask each other.  P was really good at thinking of hard questions and we would talk through the pluses and minuses of each situation...  For example, "What if the car plunged off this bridge, what would you do?" or "What if you found a wallet full of money at the rest stop, what would you do?" and on and on.  Good situations and bad ones, we talked through what we hoped we could do, what would likely happen then, and how we would react to each result. Like a game of life. I still like talking to P about those kind of scenarios.  He is good at pointing out all the angles and really getting into a good exploration of all the possibilities with me, except now the scenarios are a lot more realistic.