My Mother Told Me To Pick This One

We were walking by the playground the other day and I found myself intrigued as I watched the little kids play. They had a soccer field, two basketball courts, a sand pit, some grassy area and then a big and little kid playground. I heard one of the kids say, "I'm bored."

REALLY?

I would have killed for a playground back in the day. Do you know what we had over a Maury Elementary School back in the 80s? CONCRETE. We went outside for recess and for 45 minutes we ran around, literally. We played tag, freeze tag and team tag. You yelled "one, two three, not it" or you did "bubble gum bubble gum" with your feet in a circle and then you played. If the school got a donation or a new teacher who still cared about children then we had a kickball. The fat kid always played pitcher and you called out whether you wanted it bouncy or just a regular roll. Then you kicked the hell out of it and hoped it didn't go up on the roof to die like the other ones.

I heard one of the little kids say, "I don't wanna get on the swings. The swings are boring."

Back in the day, swings were a goddamn anomaly. Going to a hood playground back in the day was like going on an archaeological dig in ancient Egypt. You'd see structures and make an educated guess about what USED to be there. I always saw two posts and the little hooks where a swing might have been back in the 60s or 70s, but we never had any. If you did find a playground with an intact swing that wasn't wrapped around the top and rusted over because of some ignorant child then you had better play on it quick before the bad ass project kids came along and tore that shit up.

The same went for basketball courts. We had plenty of basketball posts, there just weren't any hoops anywhere to be found. Back in the day a playground was two things: A place for kids to run around during the day and skid row at night. All kinds of shit went on inside those chain link fences after dark. Sometimes it was just grown men playing ball and ripping the hoops off the rim because they forgot this wasn't built for their big asses to dunk on. Other times it was people shooting up, having sex and doing god knows what. The next day you'd find anything from condoms to needles to bullets on the playground but one thing you didn't find were basketball rims.

Half the time it was too dangerous to go to the playground during the day, especially on the weekend, so you played in front of your house. There isn't a lot of space on the sidewalk so you made up games. There was "O-U-T, Out" which was just dodgeball but with three chances. "High, low" where you tied a rope to someone's fence and someone pulled the other end so you could all line up and see who could jump highest over the rope. There were always those sad looking lonely little girls who didn't have enough friends so they tied one end of the rope to a fence, one girl turned the other end and the second girl jumped in the middle. The boys played "throwback" where you just threw a football into a crowd and whoever caught it and made it out scored a point. If you got really bored then you just played "How many steps can I jump down."

All of this was done on concrete by kids who had little to no health insurance and we came out just fine. Sort of.

"Grandma, I fell outside and hit my head. I can't feel some of my fingers."
"I told you to keep your ass in here in the first place. Go in the room and lay down."