At a recent family dinner, after several glasses of wine, my younger brother decided to wax philosophical to my 12-year-old nephew. My brother’s thesis that evening was “Don’t get married. Don’t have kids. You’ll regret it.”
Knowing my brother’s track record with both marriages and children, this conversation made perfect sense to me, and although I personally think it would take a whole lot more to push a pre-teen boy into a life of lonely celibacy, my mother and sister felt the discussion was inappropriate. “Ignore your uncle,” my sister said flatly, “he hit his head frequently as a child and doesn’t always know what he’s saying.”
My nephew looked concerned. “Did he ride his bike without a helmet?” he asked. My brother and I looked at each other in amazement and laughed out loud. “What are helmets?” my brother asked incredulously.
My nephew, growing up in a safe cocoon of play dates and 24/7 cell phone contact with his parents could not imagine it, but on a typical summer morning our mother would tell us to go outside and play. This meant that we were to come home for lunch and be back home for dinner. In between we were on our own.
The opportunities for mischief, and head injury, were plentiful. Left to our devices my brother and I, like any unsupervised pre-teen boys, would invent activities designed to seriously maim each other.
My brother’s claim to fame was that he invented bicycle “ghost riding.” The object was to ride your bike as fast as possible down the street and then jump off so the bike kept going without you. This rarely ended well, since the rider would smack the pavement hard enough to result in concussion while the bike usually collided with unlucky pedestrians or freaked out motorists.
I invented a game called “high speed skids.” In this game you rode your bike as fast as possible around a neighbor’s circular gravel driveway and tried to stop fast, which would generally pitch you over the handlebars onto your head.
By far the best game was three-man shuffleboard. Our neighbor, the ancient Widow Pickle, had a shuffleboard court in her backyard. Two of us, each equipped with a stick and several pucks would stand at either end of the shuffleboard court while the third player stood barefoot in the middle. The court, which was a sheath of silky smooth cement was wet down with the hose so it was as slick as a sheet of ice.
When the signal was given, the two players at either end would rapidly shoot their pucks back and forth down the court, aiming for the bare feet of the one in the middle. The object of the game was to “get” the middleman. The object of the middleman was to dodge the pucks by jumping around on the wet concrete.
My brother and I and our friends thought this was the best game in the world and we would laugh like hyenas when someone got hit hard or fell on the wet concrete and hit their head. Later we would limp home, bruised and bloody, and Mom would tell us to jump in the pool to wash off the blood before dinner. It took more than a little bit of blood to rattle my mother.
Now, my nephew’s eyes were wide. “Did they really do all that?” he asked my mother, who, still annoyed by the earlier conversation, nodded. My nephew thought for a moment. “Do YOU regret having kids?” he asked her. “Ask me later,” she said, looking at my brother.