I ran across an article warning parents about the dangers of children having “idle hands’ during the summer. The premise of the report tells us that today’s children, with their obsession with electronics, can become isolated during the summer vacation period and spend too much time in their rooms, connecting with friends electronically rather than face to face.
I let my mind wander back to the summer vacations of my youth and the most common phrase that kept coming up was, “You kids get outside and find something to do or I’ll find something to do for you!”
I was reading a novel, set in the ’50s, and the Mother yelled at her kids, “Wash your hands and feet and get up to bed.” I’d forgotten about black feet. Spending all day without shoes and socks, road tar, tree sap and good old dirt would turn the soles of your feet black from June to September.
A summer day would start with chores, usually in the garden. By August, beans were ready. Green beans, yellow beans, pole beans and picking the bush beans meant you also got your knees dirty.
Once a couple of pans of beans were plucked from the vines, you had to tip and tail them and cut them up for canning or freezing.
This was all done in the early morning before the heat of the day and, while we were chopping beans on the covered back porch we would discuss the plans for the day.
Some days it was just a continuation of the game of scrub we had started the day before. Slowly everyone would gather, some brought balls, some bringing bats. Pieces of plywood or burlap sacks would serve as bases on the well-worn base baths and, without backstops or umpires, the game would resume.
Maybe it was a day for bike riding. Bikes were amazing pieces of transportation and they weren’t specialty pieces of equipment like BMX or mountain bikes or expensive road racing bikes. The bikes of my youth had fenders and the chain guards that were held on by a twisted piece of wire. The seat was wrapped in tape and the headlight never stayed pointing straight.
Those bikes could go anywhere. They could fly across ditches, race through the neighbour’s fields, negotiate the trails through the blackberries and if you slammed on the brakes on a gravel road, you could spin them around, raising a cloud of dust.
We had secret forts in the bushes surround by bugs and wasps and spiders. We had dangerous forts in the trees with splinters and nails sticking up everywhere. We had gravel pits full of rust coloured water and we had rivers with slippery banks and strong under currents.
I don’t recall ever having to call for an ambulance or Search and Rescue to rescue me or one of my friends. Even though we had all of those dangers around us we also had something called ‘common sense.’ If someone got hung up, we figured it out and the last thing we needed was our parents finding out.
If my hands were idle on a summer day, they were usually turning the pages of a book. Maybe that is why I don’t like to sit and do nothing in my retired years. There is just too much to do out there.
Bring your glove and ball over; we can play ’til its dark.
At least, that’s what McGregor says.