I Remember
January 20, 2011
THIS IS me (left) in 1966 with my best friend, B. We look innocent, but actually we weren’t. We were always scheming. We wanted to buy cupcakes at the store down the street and never had enough cash. So we sold lemonade. We opened a nursery school and charged tuition (it lasted for a few days.) We opened a neighborhood library in the hopes of elevating minds and collecting fines for overdue books from other children. From the age of seven to about 13, we were constantly scheming. That’s what I mean by normality. We lived in a world apart. The rest of the human race had trivial concerns unrelated to cupcakes.
— Comments —
Gail Aggen writes:
I don’t know what the adults thought of you but obviously you made a lively and interesting companion to your chums! Scheming, indeed, a girl after my own heart! I think we might have been good friends had we lived in each other’s world as children.
January must be a good time for remembering and introspection. Within the last week I have written two such “I remember” pieces, here and here, about my somewhat quirky, but I think interesting childhood – if you have time, although I don’t see how you have much left over after daily keeping the marauding hordes at bay, you can see the posts here.
I really wish these kinds of adventures would be available for children today. People nowadays live such colorless lives. Everything is so organized and scheduled. Even the time that children get to be home is worked around the schedule.
How can you really learn anything of value of synthesize your great childhood thoughts and observations if you are not allowed to experience anything that isn’t on the schedule, or you are always sedated by passive entertainment, or worse yet, psychotropic medicine?
I hope that children still scheme and make up adventures for themselves. I tried to provide this for my children. They were allowed to get dirty, to build forts outside out of scraps of this and that, and forts inside out of sheets and blankets draped over furniture. They were allowed to take things apart and put them together. But to outsiders, I was always a little suspect even then in the 80’s and 90’s. Alas, I think I may never learn to configure those little Excel boxes, nor tolerate living inside of one.
Thanks again, Laura, for all your efforts – for devoting yourself to God, family and this wonderful blog of yours! You brighten our days!
Laura writes:
Thank you.
I enjoyed your interesting pieces about your own childhood. You write:
There was, I should point out, no “family room” in anybody’s house, as I recall. Heck, my uncle’s house had a dirt cellar which held the most amazing and unique feature: a huge boulder sitting right in the middle of it! I guess back in the 1860’s when they dug out the foundation, they found it and just decided to leave it be – wouldn’t hurt anything, would it?
This a good point. Family rooms are a mixed blessing. When there was no place to play inside, children went outdoors.
I agree with you about the lack of unstructured time. Without boredom and freedom, children cannot play well. Without play, they don’t use their imaginations. My friend, B., and I went through periods of excruciating boredom. But that comes with the luxury of free time. We would never have hauled piles of books up to the efficiency apartment above her family’s garage; set them up on shelves; and then told all the children in the neighborhood to come to our library if we had to spend all our free time in ballet lessons and softball practice. (We were not succesful entrepreneurs, but we learned something about how not to run a business.) Nor would we have walked to the grocery store (for cupcakes) and stood in the check-out line loudly chatting in a foreign language of our own invention in the hopes that people would think we were exotics.
Scheming has its dark side. I schemed for a while against B. when a new girl moved into the neighborhood. That’s something I have always regretted.
