Words and Thoughts: Soviet Kickball, Perestroika on First
Hello again, alleged readers! Over the weekend, the small child of one of my cousins (I guess that would make the child some other type of cousin or like Cousin The 2nd First Class with a Gold Sticker or some such thing) approached me with an iPad in hand, and said, “Stav, look at this!” So, I looked at “this”.
“This” was an AI generated video of a family of sharks being rescued by the Indonesian child what rides on the front of Jalur race boats. I looked my alleged cousin right in the eye and said, “this is stupid, and it’s going to make you stupid”. Then I took his iPad away from him so I could play Angry Birds Rio on it.
This horrible encounter that I had with my cousin did however get me to thinking about what we used to do for fun, back in the proverbial “day”. The “day” was such a simpler time.
The neighborhood youth would all gather, and we all just kinda knew to meet up without the aid of cell phones. Instead, as kids, we’d stare at the sun until it was up over the tree line across the field behind the neighborhood, and once it was up over the tree line, that’s when we’d all head to the vacant lot and figure our day out. Everyone would be there, except Billy, but nope, wait, Billy was there, he was just in my sun induced blind spot, and then the games would start.
My favorite was kickball. “Dibs on Gorbachev!” I’d yell as we were dividing teams. “Why do YOU get to be Gorbachev again?” one of the other kids would always whine. “Because I brought the plum, doofus” I’d invariably retort. And then I’d smash the plum on my head, we’d let it dry for a few minutes, and then we’d play kickball.
Occasionally though, someone else would bring a plum, and we’d both have to be Gorbachev. But that would get confusing pretty quickly because you can’t just have two Gorbachev’s in the infield. So we’d usually draw straws, one of us would wash the plum off, and be Yeltsin instead. Then the good-natured heckling would start: “Here comes Yeltsin, maybe he’ll kick it better than he could transition to a free market economy!” “Yeltsin, more like sucks at fieldin’!” “Oh look, it’s Yeltsin with the good hair!”
Kickball was the best, until one of us kicked it over the fence and into the schoolyard, and then we’d either have to go talk to the kids that always hung out in the gazebo in the schoolyard, or more preferably just call it a day. The schoolyard gazebo kids were always playing Pokémon, but not like the card game, instead they’d just jump around the Gazebo yelling about being Charmander, and you’d have to “battle” them to get the ball back.
No thank you. Kickball in the vacant lot was so much better than Pokémon in the schoolyard gazebo. Both were better than my cousin’s iPad though.
