Small Kid Time

When you are a youngster, the world seems to vast and larger than anything you could imagine.  Looking back, if you can remeber that far, reality is not what you thought it would be.  Many things that have come to past are bright and wonderful, while there are some that didn't meet your expectation.  So, these ramblings are not to be categorized as absolute or otherwise definitive.  Just blowing in the wind!

A little over a month ago, I drove past the elementary and Junior High School that I attended in my youth.  It looked so familiar from a distance but with a closer look, I found the hallways and classrooms much smaller than I remembered.  The stairs, railings, and walkways looked conveniently built for small people.  Peering through the windows, desks, chairs, and shelves were modernized for little people.  Wow, big difference from the old desks with names carved in the woodwork.  Yeah! No hole slot for our ink bottle or paste jar.  Things were sure different.

Where todays youngsters hang their backpacks on hooks along the wall, we had homemade school bags sewn out of denim for our books and lunch.  The cafeteria had modern tables built for little people and where we took our assigned turn working in the lunchroom with the cooks and staff, you only find hired staff doing all the work.  Understandable when you stop and think of safety, insurance cost, sanitary environment, and other requirements.  My friend's mom was the cafeteria manager back in the day. 
There's a designated school bus pickup zone for those who ride the school buses while those of us who lived close enough would walk to school and back home.  That even meant sunny, windy, rainey and even cold days.  Oh, it never snowed on us.  We could only wish. 

While in the fourth grade, my classroom was on the second floor and we could look out and see the white caps on days that were windy.  On occassion, you could spot a whale cruising offshore.  It made for a challenge paying attention to our teacher. 

For most of the time attending school, I never wore shoes.  All my toes were liberated and allowed to  breathe.  The soles of my feet were customized to walk on dirt, grass, sand, pebbles, and plain hardtop.  The walk or run never bothered our feet.  All the fancy and expensive shoes didn't exist back in the day.  Converse or Keds were the only just being noticed, if you could afford them.  Being barefoot meant that you were "tougher than dirt!" 

We wore jeans, the denim kind.  Being cool was being able to role up the length of your jeans and form a nice even fold, doubled.  The lighter blue color of the inside of the denim was like having racing stripes.  Of course, maybe wearing shoes with them would make things a notch higher in the dress standard. 
I should admit here that if you didn't wear shoes or went barefooted, you wore slippers or flip flops.  Yeah, the flopping sould was cool also.  It allowed your toes to feel the freedom while enjoying the comfort of some cushion on the soles of your feet. 

On those occassional rainy days, we carried bamboo umbrellas, made of bamboo, and covered with a wax type paper that was covered with a varnish to make it somewhat waterproof.  It's the kind you see in movies with geisha girls twirling.  With it raining often, these umbrellas would last a year at the most. 

We weren't without transportation.  My parents had a car, the family car.  An older model Plymouth with classic running boards, it was built solid.  It wasn't as fast as todays cars but coasting downhill, we could hit 60, maybe 65 with a good tail wind.  You could push start it to get it going, and you tried not to grind the gears when shifting.  Remember to let off the clutch gently while shifting into gear. 

How the world has changed?  I guess I should be grateful to technology, but I miss the old days when life was really living in the slow lane.