Where Have All the Children Gone?

 I like to think that I’m immune to nostalgia if for no other reason than that asthma nearly killed me when I was a kid.  In my case, memories of “the good old days” can include just a whiff of the Grim Reaper.  But I am human, and I do reminisce from time to time.  The trick is to remember to wheeze in order to keep perspective.

That said, I want to know where all the kids are in the summer.  Doesn’t anybody play outside anymore?  No, I’m not going to say I was out the door from sunup to sundown, but I did manage to fill up a summer’s day by spending more of it outside than in.  For all of twenty-five cents, a rubber ball was good for at least three physically challenging, fun games that I can think of.

For openers, running bases.  You’d pick two cracks in the front sidewalk to represent bases, have two fielders and as many runners as you had friends on hand.  If and when that got old, we might switch to three outs.  You threw that rubber ball against the front stairs, and your opponent tried to catch it before the ball could drop in for a hit.  The sidewalk might be a single, the front grass a double, the sewer cover a triple and the street a homerun.

If you were old enough, fast pitching was the challenge of challenges, usually played in a school yard.  Somebody marked a strike zone in chalk on the wall, everyone agreed on where the pitching rubber should be, and various landmarks constituted hits, like in three outs, only a lot further spaced out because you were hitting the ball.  This was a game I played to at least my 40^th birthday.

Now that I look back at things, Clare must’ve been the only kid on the block to do anything remotely like the above, and she did it with her old man.  We played catch in the backyard, and I pitched to her out front, until she showed she could hit a rubber ball as far as the houses across the street.  By the time she was in second or third grade, we found a school yard where I could pitch to her; kids watched on in amazement.  Then came Pony Ball, then came travel, and the girl stopped doing much of anything outside around the house except for the occasional game of catch (yes, with me) in the alley.

No one has taken her place.  Kids either save all the summer athletic stuff for travel sports, soccer included, or they sit inside playing on their zombie-box or working their zombie-phone.  The asthma medication that exists today represents real progress from what I had back in the day.  How kids spend a summer day, I fear, is a change for the worse.