Thursday 8 January 2015

Back in the Day...

The cold weather is here and I am not happy.  Even being a native Canadian and growing up with the extreme weather changes that we experience from summer to winter, I still hate the cold.  I didn't always hate the cold.  I remember as a kid toboganning down the hill on the other side of the park behind our house with all my friends.  We would stay out til either or hands and feet were numb or our mitts got wet - this, of course, was a direct result of throwing snow balls at eachother or generally just diving into the snow drifts.  As a matter of fact, no one "went in" til one of those conditions was present or you were labelled a baby.  And if somebody's mom called them, well, that was just the icing on the humiliation cake.  This was of course decades before video games, internet and electronic devices.  If we were bored, we had 2 choices: play indoors or play outdoors.  And just because it was snowing and -10 didn't deter the latter.  Of course, those were also the 2 choices we had in the summer as well.  The difference being that the limitation of going "in" time was the street lights.  Once they came on, everybody went home.  Cuz everybody's moms all had the same rule.  Life was a lot simpler back then.  We all had the same family experiences, except some were bigger families than others, but the economics, traditions and day to day existence was pretty much the same.  We all went to the same school and our mom's all shopped at the same department stores.  There was no status difference.  Nobody wore brand name clothes or shoes.  Nobody had the state of the art electronics, kitchen appliance or fashion accessory.  All the girls played Barbies - one friend's mom used to knit Barbie clothes for her so we always wanted to see the new outfits her mom had made.  All the boys played street hockey (summer and winter) screeching the infamous "car" when the game was interrupted by someone actually wanting to drive down the street (?!?! - the nerve!).  Some of the girls were invited to play street hockey in order to make up enough team members but once the other boys came out, we were uninvited very quickly.  It was common to have moms and dads sitting outside on their porches to get a breath of cool air on a summer evening (cuz no one had air conditioning - that was for the rich folk) and no one dared misbehave cuz everybody's mom or dad would give you "the treatment" whether you belonged to them or not.  Looking back it was a pretty good life back then.  But I guess you don't appreciate what you've got til it's gone, right?  I don't want to end this on a negative note, so I will say that my life now is great and I would not change a thing, but how fun would it be to just spend one day back in the 60's?  No dishwasher, no cell phone, no Xbox, no cable TV.  Wait....... maybe I'm changing my mind.  LOL
Love from Lulu, xoxo

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