I Grew Up During the “Shit Happens” Era of Parenting

My generation is the last one to see these things.  We played outside, barefoot, from whenever to dusk.  Our little feet were tough as leather.  My sister and I were well monitored, but we knew other kids who were “turned out” on the neighborhood, told not to come back until dark. (They would sometimes come to the back door for  a drink of water. I’m serious.) We rode bikes with no helmets (I don’t even think they were available) and no shoes.  A rite of passage was to coast down our hill with your feet on the bike handlebars.

I dug in the dirt and made a variety of mud pies, baking them in the sun with decorations of sand, grass, and dirt.  I shared a sandbox with our cat.  I’d flip the cat turds out into the yard and go on playing.  Nothing bad happened to me or to the kids I knew (at least I think) but something must have been going wrong for some of them.  It’s just not possible that no bad things ever happened, but they didn’t happen to me so I presumed everyone was having the same experience.

However, there were some elements of this laissez-faire school of childhood that make me cringe, even now.  Take, for example, lawn darts.  Imagine a foot long dart, exactly like a dart you find in a bar, with a two or three inch long needle on one end.  You throw the dart at a target laid out on the lawn. Unimaginable.

Then there was Bounceland, my introduction to trampolines.  Some genius thought this would be like a miniature golf park, sort of.  There were fifteen or so trampolines, at ground level, which you paid to jump on.  But the springs around the sides weren’t covered, and you were jumping over a pit that was lined and edged with concrete.  Mind you, this was completely unsupervised – you paid for your half hour (or whatever) and were assigned to a spot and off you would go. Oh, and the paths between the trampolines were gravel.

Who thought this would be a good idea?  Where would you start with the problems with this system? (If you don’t believe this happened, just look up the injury lawsuits that ultimately closed these parks down. Shit does happen, sometimes.)

There were cringe-worthy opportunities everywhere, large to small. Consider pea shooters.  You could buy these at the dime store.  You got a rigid plastic straw and a bag of dried peas.  Load the peas into your mouth, feed them into the straw with your tongue, then blow.  With any luck you’ll put your friend’s eye out.  My sister and I bought these, of course, then spent our time one night, just before sleep, shooting at each other from our beds.  Later, our loving father came to check on us, barefoot as he always was, and that’s how we learned to cuss.

Here’s something else that makes any modern parent wonder how their own parents lived to make babies.  In the cars, there were no seat belts, of course, and no child safety seats.  Instead, we had canvas seats that were suspended on metal frames that slid over back of the front seat, raising the baby up “to see out” – and also be just the right height to slam through the windshield in a crash.  Mine was fancy, with a plastic steering wheel right in front of my little chest so I could “steer”.

No doubt shit was happening. It must have happened to somebody, but not to me.

Oh, wait - there was that one time. I was coasting my bike down a grassy hill and didn’t see the guy wire that held up a telephone pole. It got me right across the throat and knocked me off my bike. That did hurt, and I suppose I could have died. That would have been a shitty thing to have happen.