I amused myself

     The picture above is of an Atari 2600 video game console. Aside from a few quick games of Pong at the Mossyrock Lanes bowling alley, this was the first video game I ever touched. I can't remember exactly when my family bought it, but I think it was sometime in 1978, my senior year in high school. This blog isn't about video games, though. This blog is about what we did before video games.
     In Feels Like the First Time, I wrote about how my friend and next door neighbor Mark Panter and I killed most of a summer playing with a huge, rusted out barrel. I also blogged about it here. The first thing I learned when I was writing a memoir, though, was: Just because you can remember it, doesn't mean you should write it down. That meant that a lot of childhood memories were justifiably cut from the manuscript and mostly forgotten about.
     This morning, though, I looked out my front window and saw the boy across the street playing in his yard. He had what looked like a piece of wood from a picket fence. It was a couple of feet long and sharp on one end. He was throwing it up in the air and seeing if it would stick in the ground or not. Of course, if his Mom had seen him doing that, she would have resorted to the age-old "You'll put your eye out" fun-block, but she was apparently busy elsewhere. Watching him happily throw the stick up in the air repeatedly got me to thinking about how I entertained myself in the pre-video game era.
     Admittedly, It took a little more creativity to occupy myself back then. In addition to no video games, there was no internet, no iPods, and, for me, almost no television. Cable TV didn't reach the little town I lived in until several years after I graduated, which meant that my whole life growing up, we had exactly one channel. Worse, it was the ABC affiliate, which meant that I missed all those great 70s CBS shows like MASH, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, etc. All in all, my entertainment options usually came down to the books I had and whatever I could create for myself.
     I did that in ways that would no doubt be thought odd today. Honestly, they were probably odd back then. Here's what I mean... Much of my entertainment centered around a badminton racket and a whip. That sounds like a good beginning for a plot of an erotica book, but that wasn't the case at all. 
     Growing up in a small town that was heavily made up of farmers, it wasn't all that unusual to find whips laying around here and there. The first time I picked one up, I found I had a knack for "cracking" it, probably because I was tall and skinny - I was kind of built like a whip myself. I spent more hours than I could count wandering around our little piece of acreage, cracking the whip my sister Terri bought me for Christmas. I got so that I could crack the head off a dandelion from eight feet away. Sadly, this skill never translated well into later life, and I haven't picked up a whip in 35 years.
     Also, although I wasn't very athletic as a kid, I was a terror on the badminton court. That probably had more to do with my willingness to sacrifice my body going after a shot than any natural athleticism. Again, this not a skill that was helpful in later life or for impressing girls. I would spend entire afternoons wandering around the yard, hunting moths and flying ants with my racket. The days when the cherry tree in the yard dropped its blossoms was always exciting. I would stand for hours, swinging my racket at the falling white blossoms. Knowing this about me, it's easier to see why Dawn was my first girlfriend, isn't it?
     I never remember feeling bored during those years, although I'm sure today's teenagers would be out of their gourd with boredom after about ten minutes of that lifestyle. Instead, I feel blessed that I grew up in that time, when imagination took the place of binary code.