I don’t ever remember being bored during summers as a kid. Not that I would have ever admitted it anyway, because you can be sure such an utterance would most certainly lead to a list of chores. (We never called them “chores”. That is a word that I learned from television. We called them “jobs”. Which may explain why some of us think that if we just stay out of big people’s way and perfect the art of self amusement, that we might be able to escape work altogether.) First, it was a lot easier not to be bored in the house I grew up in because I had so many brothers and sisters. We didn’t have to sit around and wait for some neighborhood kid to show up because we always had someone handy to play with, fight with, get in trouble with, laugh with, but most importantly, someone to offer up if anything broke. Lots of time was spent outside. Of course it was hot, but it was cooler outside than inside. I didn’t grow up in old fashioned, high ceilings to help keep the house cooler kind of a house. I grew up in a modern 1950’s, ceilings only high enough to keep Daddy from hitting his head house. So the little bit of air circulation generated from the box fan aimed at Momma while she folded clothes wasn’t really worth sticking around and risking that she would recruit you.
Plus, there was a lot of stuff to do outside. Heat makes animals docile. Especially cats. Jingle Bells (his real name, by the way. I promised to protect the innocent, but Jingles was not the kind of cat one would associate with innocence) was a grump so we had to leave him alone, but the other cats would endure being dressed up in doll clothes or lying on their backs resting on our legs while we picked the fleas off their bellies. We also played lots of games. I’m not talking about organized sports or even sandlot type activities. Again, those were just things that the so called typical American kids on television or the kids who lived in the south part of town would do (although, we didn’t know that the kids in the south part of town were doing that until we got much older. After all, paper cups and string only stretch so far). Momma had a really keen eye for safety. We did not have bikes because we didn’t have sidewalks in our neighborhood. (Somehow it never dawned on us that the streets were not made safer during the day because the only place a car could be found during a summer week day was either in some chemical plant’s parking lot or the carport with the family’s only driver sleeping soundly after a night of working the dog shift.) We had balls (not baseballs, only the big plastic kind that wouldn’t break the picture window) but we had no bats. Not that it mattered. Even if we had bats, we would never have used them to hit an object so far that someone would have to run after it to retrieve it. It was hot, after all, and we weren’t stupid. So the games we played only involved things like climbing really tall trees, making club houses under bumblebee riddled wisteria trees, and digging holes to China with Daddy’s tools.
On rainy days our family playground, worn completely smooth by nonstop playing, barefooted younguns, would flood and it would take some serious sun before the mud would get solid enough not to seep between our toes only to dry and be deposited later inside the house. So we played different games. We played school (probably why we were a family of very good students), we played house (we had to play this one away from Momma’s notice or she tried to inject some reality into the game with real work) and, being the good little Catholic kids we were, we played Mass.
But we were never bored. Never ever. Again, that was just a word we heard on television when we were kids, and a hundred million trillion times when we became parents of our own “shirren”.
P.S. All you well meaning souls who plan to suggest keeping Peanut Butter and Jelly from getting bored with some jobs of his own, don’t bother. It would be easier to try and bring a cow to a racetrack.
