My nephew, John Jones, who is seven years younger than I compared our childhood with that of his grandchildren:
Reality vs. virtuality is the main difference. Almost all of our games were played in the “real” world. Kick the can requires real kids kicking a real can on a real street with running through real yards while screaming!
We learned to develop interpersonal relationships . . . We played cards and board games while TALKING to the other players. So many games today are played in a virtual environment by a single player, a community of one. Many of today’s games are a solitary effort with no involvement of others and no interaction with anything other than a machine. Also, many parents won’t (shouldn’t) let their children roam free as we did. Yards are surrounded by privacy fences which aren’t conducive to our games.
A huge difference is that our parents didn’t hover like helicopters, trying to make our childhood risk free.
Wonderful words cannot be repeated too often! Marcel Proust, the French author of In Search of Lost Time, described an “ah-ha!” moment that is one of the most famous and lovely pieces of writing in literature. He wrote about his experience when he sipped a spoonful of tea that had a bit of cookie soaked in it while visiting his aunt:
An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses . . . Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? And then, searching his mind, he knew:
When from a long-distant past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting for their moment. Once I recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine. immediately the old grey house rose up like the scenery of a theatre . . . and with the house the town, the streets along which I used to run errands, . . . all the flowers in the garden and the good folk of the village and their dwellings and the whole of Combray and its surroundings . . . sprang into being, town and gardens alike from my cup of tea.
Great writers tap into the human condition. Is there a one of us who doesn’t share Proust’s experience? Thus it is with Wanda and me. During our trips down memory lane, we leapfrog over each other’s memories in a joyous jumble of reminiscence. I see it all in my mind’s eye: our houses and the old Academy building with its twin towers surmounted by a globe and a telescope . . . Mary Leisure’s Dress Shop, Jolly’s Drug Store where we drank phosphates and cherry cokes, Rihms’ Meat Market and the Elite Café where Lora Mae and I met for lunch on Saturdays when I worked at the “Knightstown Banner” and she at the I.G.A. . . . the rickety-Catholic church at the foot of the Adams St. hill and the Methodist Church where the Girl Scouts met and where the kind minister found me sobbing because I’d arrived too late to go to a picnic, so he drove me . . . the library where my number was 1369 . . . the carnivals at Sunset Park and Jubilee Days on the Town Square where we did the “Bunny Hop” and the “Hucklebuck . . . ”
And, oh, the people: Beloved teachers and Superintendent L. E. Rogers who was called “Old Eaglebeak” by my Uncle Nolan’s generation and “Chrome Dome” by John’s . . . the members of Kiwanis who loaned me money so that I could attend college . . . and so many others . . . I remember them all.
My old friends and I know where we came from, who we were, and where we belonged. We are so rich! wclarke@comcast.net