Earlier this month I turned 76.
I still can’t wrap my brain around that. Over seven and a half decades — that sounds really old.
And the older I get, it seems like conversations with friends more and more tend to drift back to our childhood and how different things were then. I’m guessing this happens for a couple of reasons. For one thing, at our age not too much exciting is happening, except visits to a variety of doctors and many of those details are things you don’t want to share over dinner. The other reason is even though most of the time we can’t remember conversations we had yesterday, we vividly remember stuff that happened when we were 11 years old.
Join me as I rewind the time machine back to the mid-1950s.
The Des Plaines river ran through the forest preserve at the end of our street. About once a week starting in late November, the neighborhood kids would check to see if the river was frozen enough to ice skate on. Finally the word would spread that it was solid ice from shore to shore. The boys with their hockey skates and the girls wearing figure skates would spend hours on the river, racing, playing hockey or practicing spins and skating backward. Occasionally someone would fall through the ice where it was too thin but there were never any major injuries.
During the summer we would play baseball on the street in front of our house. The manhole cover was home plate, sewer grates in the gutters were 1st and 3rd and we used a piece of cardboard for 2nd base. The catcher and center fielder would watch out for cars and yell at everyone to “clear the field” until the vehicle passed. Fortunately we lived in a residential neighborhood where there wasn’t too much traffic, but looking back, playing in the street was probably not the smartest thing to do.
My best friend Cynthia Kerr and I decided to become “blood sisters.” Wiktionary defines “blood sisters” as “a female bound to another one in commitment and friendship by a ceremonial mingling of blood.” Cynthia and I were inseparable . She lived about four houses down the street and we played together every day. I’m not sure where we got the idea — probably some TV show or movie we had seen, but one summer day we took a small paring knife from the kitchen, went out in the backyard, each poked our pinky finger, squeezed until we got a good size drop of blood and smushed our fingers together.
On the rare occasion someone got a helium-filled balloon for a special occasion we would wait until it no longer floated, and then my dad would poke a hole in the balloon. We all inhaled deeply and then laughed hysterically at our high-pitched voices. I think that’s called huffing now and it’s not at all a healthy thing to do.
Another thing my dad would do is bring home mercury from his job at the AB Dick Company and my friends and I would play for hours rolling it around in our hands, trying to make it break up into little balls and then make it re-form into one big glob. (Apparently mercury poisoning was not a thing back then.)
All the kids in the neighborhood had a bike — usually a big, clunky Schwinn. The girls usually had a basket in the front and some of us had a playing card attached to spokes of the back wheel with a clothes pin so it would make a fun clicking sound as we rode around. In the summer we’d ride to the school playground, or to the ice cream store or just around the neighborhood, playing “cops & robbers” or “cowboys & Indians.” The rule was to be home by the time the street lights came on.
Those were the days, my friend … we thought they’d never end. But they did. We grew up and now look back nostalgically sharing stories that are often embellished. As my husband Mike often says “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
