A Ragtag Crew of Neighborhood Kids

In the 70s and 80s, the kids in my neighborhood were a hodgepodge of characters. A motley crew of sorts, for the most part we ordinarily would have never chosen each other as friends. Life made that decision for us—members selected purely out of circumstance and proximity. Our jumble banded together day in and day out, traipsing around as a singular unit, until our mothers stepped out their back doors to holler for our return home.

I have brief recollections from when we moved to our new neighborhood when I was nearly four. One is of the excitement I felt at seeing a mother with two girls a little bigger than myself in the backyard beside ours. They were on the cement patio abutting their house. The mother was lounging on an aluminum, webbed lawn chair while the girls fiddled about nearby. I ran over to meet them and for some reason told them my name was Wendy.

I have no idea why I did that. Maybe I'd heard the name somewhere and liked it better than my own. Perhaps I'd given that name to one of my dolls. Maybe my mind figured, New home, new life . . . new name. Whatever the reason, it felt like I'd gotten away with something sneaky . . . until my mom revealed my real name.

I became instant friends with the girl closer to my age.

Back then parents strongly encouraged (okay, maybe forced) their kids to get out of the house and play all day. The possibility of a drudgery of assigned chores helped persuade us to join with the ragtag bunch of fellow misfits.

My new best friend and I were, in my mind, the most similar of our bunch. Some of the others seemed more unique. Or perhaps I just saw them that way after I became acquainted with their parents, who seemed pretty eccentric—like the girl's father who built his own especially great darkroom in their basement, and the boy's father who seemed to be forever hidden away in their garage constructing an airplane.

Now and then, after the sun went down, my crew combined with our older siblings' to play Ghost in the Graveyard. But primarily our own was a group out to conquer the world, or the neighborhood at least. Add in some bicycles and the neighborhood was our oyster. In fact, I don't recall having any specific boundaries drawn.

Sometimes I think about the things we were allowed to do, that we survived to tell the tale, and that we're all the better for it.

Feed, the corporate magazine of the Jerónimo Martins group, writes this about my generation of Americans born between 1965 and 1980:

"Generation X is the last generation who will remember what it was like to have a life without the internet, especially the oldest members of this group."

Author Michael Harris says,

"We are the only translators of 'before' and 'after.' We’re the ones who get to know what the difference is. And that, in the history of human events, is going to turn out to be a very rare thing."

The other day I was reminiscing with my old neighborhood friend about how good we had it as kids. That we were able to roam and be outside all day. That we were able to be free. In one of my judgy moments, I expressed my annoyance at parents today who don't offer a similar experience to their children, who instead allow their kids to stay inside all day stuck in front of a screen. She was quick to remind me most people don't live in a place like we did. They don't have the same outdoor space or safety available to them. And she was right.

I'm thankful I had that growing up. Life's happenstance shaped for us the clichéd "good old days." I'm glad I have the fond memories from a juncture of circumstances just before technology cropped up and captured our attention—memories the likes of which might, unfortunately, fade away with my generation.

For now, when I see kids being kids, sharing life together, having in-person encounters, exploring their neighborhood, I feel nostalgic and satisfied, that things are still right for the new generation.

I like to think I was able to pass on some of that childhood freedom to my own kids when they were little . . . that as a parent I encouraged my kids to be kids, to get out and conquer their neighborhood, to build some active memories. And I have hope that tradition will continue, because it's important. It's pretty great I had the opportunity to know most of my neighbors and experience firsthand the differences in the ways we lived.

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