3381 Then

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Death is an alternate existence.

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Man, I write next to nothing here for months, and today you can't shut me up. Must be the snow....

Why is it that every time I connect with someone from the past on Classmates.com, they immediately put my email address on their broadcast list and start sending me those stupid cutsy-poo memes that everybody has been sending everybody else for years? Then I finally get annoyed and ask them to remove me from their forward lists, and they get pissed and I never hear from them again.

Well, today I got a forward of the "Remember Back When" genre. Then, coincidentally, Becs wrote about how different playtime is for kids today as compared to Back When. I started to write a comment on Becs' post, then decided it would be too long, so, Becs, here's my comment.

Yeah.

When I was in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, we lived in Ottawa, Ontario. We kids used to go everywhere in the city on the city buses and trolleys. A nickle got you on, and you'd get a transfer when you got off that was good for several hours, which you could use on any other bus or trolley, where you'd get another transfer, and so on. You could go anywhere, all day, on that one nickle.

No cell phones. We left the house in the morning with our nickle, and our parents didn't know where in the whole city we were, until we showed up again at supper time. We had another nickle in our sock for the pay telephone, in case we got sick or something.

Actually, we often left the city. We'd take the bus across the river to French-speaking Hull, basically the "other half" of Ottawa, to go to French movies. If we took the ticket stub to school, we'd get 5 points credit in French class.

We'd go for bike rides, straight out into the countryside, passing signposts that said "Ottawa 20 miles" (it was still "miles" then, pre-conversion) behind us.

Or we'd go to the Parliament buildings in the middle of the city, and watch the mounties and pet their horses. There was a hotel near Parliament with an indoor pool, and no one ever questioned our right to use the changing rooms and swim there. I guess they just assumed our parents were guests or members.

The Rideau Canal snaked through the city. It froze in the winter, and we would skate the length of it (maybe 4 miles?) and back. No adults herding us, just lots of kids on the ice.

We were 10, 11, 12 years old, but younger kids were doing it, too. Here, now, kids can't walk the 1/2 block to their home from the school bus until they're over 12. If a pre-approved adult isn't waiting at the bus stop, the driver is not allowed to let the kid off.

Kids are learning that the whole world is depraved. "Back When", we were pretty much set loose on the world. And, hey, we survived! Along the way we learned about weird people, and good people, and dangerous things and safe things. Getting lost and finding our way back again.

We learned about making independent choices, and dealing with the consequences.

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Hallowe'en. I don't want to hand out sugar, the state won't allow fruit (unless very expensively individually wrapped) and last year's kids didn't seem too thrilled with bags of salty corn or potato carbs. This year I ordered small bottles of bubble stuff. The supplier called yesterday (the order was placed over a week ago) and has promised that they will arrive by 3 pm Monday. They're being shipped UPS from a warehouse in northern NJ, so, maybe.

I don't know what I'll do if they don't arrive on time.

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Go to snopes.com and search for Halloween apples razor. There's only one documented nutcase. The rest seem to be hoaxes, or kids being "funny".

People overreact to everything, and I think it's because they've been "guilted" into feeling responsible if anything goes wrong.

That, plus the fear of lawsuits.

And the fear of not being politically correct. (Which, by the way, leads to a whole new topic: "Politically Correct" is gradually going from being a social thing to being a real political thing. People are being arrested for insulting the government or government employees. Death threats or real death are dealt for being "unpatriotic".)

Sheesh.

Really, truly, watch the video in the previous post.

...What if some stupid kid drinks the bubble stuff and gets diarrhea, and the parents sue me? See how it works, where it goes? In the current American climate, it could happen....
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