When I was a boy, I was happy when I got a new yo-yo, or top. I played roller-bat, tag, and kick the can with my friends on Bayshore Drive in Pensacola, Florida, when the part by our house was still dirt.
On New Year's Eve, and 4th of July, my sister and I got to run around like crazy kids in the front yard with sparklers, since fireworks were illegal in Florida.
I had a pocket knife and a BB gun, climbed trees and swam in the bay. I rode my bicycle all over Pensacola, and even had a job at age 14... paperboy... picking up my papers at 3 AM by myself, folding them, and then riding my bike for an hour and a half to deliver them.
Today, age 78, I have NO CLUE what pleasure people find in video games and television. If that's what they like, fine, but, I don't get it.
Life becomes more complicated. Computers are supposed to save us work and paper, but, I've never been handed so much paper in my life.
We know more about each other, yet trust each other less.
Cops used to see me with a BB gun and say, "Be careful now." These days, I cannot even shoot a BB gun in my back yard for fear of being arrested, or, at least, getting a fine.
People are afraid, worried.
Neighbors? What does THAT mean?
I lived on the same street from 1949 to 1973. The people on my street were the Sparks, the Lands, the Baumans, Mr. Dugger, Mrs. Mobley, and Mr. & Mrs. Mason.
Sometimes I wish I could just go back, with the windows open on a hot summer evening, and the fan blowing, and Mr. Nickleson's beagles barking down there around the bend where the road went around the huge oak, and, whien it rained, the biggest, car-eating mud puddle in the dirt road, just past the house where the Whitehouse kids, the ones who shot at me with their BB guns lived... and just past the house where the guy with the cat that kept getting "lost" who had the great stereo system lived... the guy not the cat.
Donovan Baldwin