I lived in suburban Chicago and though the big city was only 30 minutes away, there wasn’t much to do where I lived. It snowed plenty so sometimes we would do things with that, but I only had the worst memories of that because I had to constantly delegate and tell people what to do when they kept breaking the fort, or building the snowman wrong, or throwing snowballs before we officially started. Yeah back then I was an uptight freak and I’ve changed a loooot since then.
Anyway some of my close friends and I were all about the adventure, and getting into trouble, at least that seemed cool but we only read of it. We couldn’t really “explore” anything because around our neighborhood were just other neighborhoods, schools, and shops. One day one of my friends came up with the idea that we should ding dong ditch people and that would be so fun, so we tried it. Problem was it was way too easy to escape them, there were tons of bushes and trees to hide from and we were pretty fast, but also it was an old neighborhood with old people and they were pretty slow. It became boring after the third day we played it, the spark just wasn’t there anymore. Not until I fixed it.
I gathered all my friends up and added a twist to the game: one person would ding dong ditch and run to the middle of the street where all the others were waiting for him and we would all stand in the middle of the street and whoever stayed their for the most time would win. Sounds easy right? All they would do is just yell at you for a few seconds and shake their head and go back inside right? Not quite.
Some of my fondest memories (I don’t really know why I’m phrasing it like that because that was literally only 6 years ago) are from that game. They would set the dogs loose on us, sometimes they called animal control which when you think about it is a smart expression of mockery, and once they called all their own old friends to chase us, that was fun because since the all were in wheel chairs and using canes we would just walk away. I kinda feel bad from annoying those old people who should have just been relaxing but from that a lot of good things came of it.
We found our own little hideout, it was a place in a nearby woulds with a circle of trees around us but open grass in the middle. There we formed little clubs and many other games like vampires vs werewolf, infection, and hocus pocus. We expanded our friend group as many other people wanted to join and I met a lot of fun and interesting kids that I still keep in touch with right now. We became more athletic and come gym class we would always win in games requiring speed, stamina, and agility making me always one of the first picks for games.
That was my all time favorite childhood memory, innocent and full of fun, but then middle school came, and homework came, and extracurriculars came. But I will always remember the game that opened up my childhood spirit, my nirvana, my spot in the woods, my game.
Though I’m said of what I can’t experience anymore, I’m happy because of what it was. It was my childhood.
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