A Little Imagination

How many can remember going outside as a child and playing. Can you remember how much imagination and creativity we could come up with. We would look around and use whatever was available in the yard to play whatever game we could come up with. If we wanted to play war we could venture over the neighbors fence into his huge garden for dirt clods. These were clumps of mud that had dried into nice little grenade pellets that would explode on impact. They were soft so they did not hurt when you were hit with them. They were far superior to the clay clods in my dad's garden. Those would not disintegrate on impact and were quite painful when hit by one. Lots of trial and error in the war games. Nothing would bring the game to a close quicker than someone running into the house crying to mom. That would get us all in trouble for throwing dirt clods. As long as no one got hurt the war games went on unnoticed by mama. If she happened to stick her head out the back screen door to check up on her little angels she saw us scramble to get into freeze tag mode. A harmless playground game. We were sneaky little devils.
   Maybe sometimes we wanted to play like we were on a Sunday drive. We would assemble a makeshift car out of scrap junk my dad collected. If we needed a steering wheel my dad had an old cast iron hand plow with what looked like a bicycle rim on it. If you turned it upside down using the free spinning rim you could imagine a steering wheel. 
   One of my favorite shows on air at the time was C.H.I.P.S . It was a show about two California Highway Patrol Officers on motorcycles. We would rummage through dad's truck find a couple of hard hats and hop on our bicycles and voila we were Jon Baker and Ponch.  Very imaginative if I don't say say myself. As a side note, if you turned the helmet around to where bill was in the back you could be Gage and Desoto from another one of my favorite shows Emergency. That was a show about two Los Angeles Paramedic/firefighters.
  We played hide-go-seek and the like but my favorite times was going out in the field next door to play football with oldest brother. I would imagine I was a star receiver running a pass route as he hurled the football 60 yards. He had an arm.
   Cynthia tells me stories of her childhood as well and apparently they were very imaginative as well. They would use sticks as guns and they had sound effects. I do kid her occasionally about the stick thing. Sometimes today we go out and play fetch with the dog and I tell the dog to go get the gun. Its not a gun until she makes the sound effect. I just see it as a stick. With the sound effect its like a light comes on and I finally get it.
   Then there were the ramps made to emulate our hero Evel Kneivel. Bricks, cinder blocks and plywood make a deadly ramp. Crashes were not uncommon and bumps and bruises were not abnormal.  Mama learned not to ask what we were doing. I don't remember any serious injuries just Kids using the imagination God gave us.
    I believe that imagination has served me well over the years. It has made me to often look outside the box at what could be. Sometimes life gives us a pile of junk or random objects to get around. If you step back and think about it maybe you could use it to take your own Sunday drive.