Time to go out and play

Fully 20% of summer is over already and I haven’t gone out to play yet.

Every morning is pretty much the same. I sit at the kitchen(ette) table and look out the window and think, “I want to go out and play.” And I’d do it, too, if I had any idea what that meant.

When I was a kid, my mom would use the term to get me out of the house and as far away from her as possible. She’d send me out the back door and down the stairs to spend a few hours wandering around the alley or walking to the park down the street.

Some days, I’d pick up pieces of broken beer bottles and toss them onto the concrete to watch them shatter. Sometimes, I’d find a stick I could use to pretend I was a swordsman or a baseball player or a conductor. I’m not sure if that was really “playing,” but mom never defined the term for me. “Play” meant out of the house and she didn’t focus on the details.

Every so often, she’d find some other mom who wanted to ditch her kids for the day and they’d put us together, but not in either one’s apartment. We couldn’t make our own plans, of course, because our phone plans included maybe three calls per month and only adults could use that privilege. We had to wait for two moms to get exasperated enough to come up with a scheme to get rid of two kids at once.

I don’t remember any stranger-danger speeches from when I was a kid. Maybe there weren’t as many ne’er-do-wells loitering around, or maybe we were just more expendable back then. Maybe the moms figured the cops would pay more attention if there were two missing kids instead of just one. Of course, that was before they started calling it “free-range parenting” instead of abandonment.

Fast-forward 60 years—and those decades disappeared faster than I could have imagined—and nothing has changed. Mom is gone, physically, but she’s still in the back of my head, hectoring me to go out and play on any sunny day that shows up outside my window. There are still plenty of broken beer bottles in the alley, and more than a few sticks, so a fun time is absolutely guaranteed.

I need to hurry, though. In ten weeks, I’ll have one more summer under my belt and one less to experience. Whatever it means to “go out and play,” the clock is ticking.

Tempus fugit.

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