Tacky question: What do you call a skeleton with long blonde hair in a closet?
That would be your Champion of the 1963 Hide-and-Seek Invitational Tournament.
See? It’s almost like a joke.
We should be able to get away with a blonde “joke” here since I was as a blonde, nappy-headed youth. Plus I was awesome at hide-and-seek, mainly because no one wanted to find me and everyone wanted to hide from me.
Not the point though. The point is that there are some things you cannot replicate on a computer or television screen with a computer game. A game like hide-and-seek, which you can play inside if it’s bad weather but outside all the time.
Is that still a thing? Hide-and-seek? I never hear recaps about great hide-and-seek games like I used to. That tells me something is up. And it’s not someone’s rear end, which is sitting on a sofa shooting cartoon lasers at cartoon warriors and prehistoric or futuristic animals.
What we might need to do is get off and up out. As in off the butt and out of doors. It’s happening outside. For wiffle ball and a swingset, if nothing else.
This is not meant to sound like the ramblings of an old dude. I did not grow up with an outhouse as the toilet. Didn’t have to quit school after third grade to help support the family. Didn’t walk five miles to school, uphill both ways. (I rode a bus two miles and Myron Ford let me change gears sometimes; it’s been a charmed life.)
But I don’t see little kids playing outside as much as I used to. Outside is where it’s at. You can’t play tag inside. Not with any success. You can’t swim in a lake inside. Can’t fly a kite inside.
It’s hot? Sure. Get conditioned. You can always duck back inside the AC, an advantage your great-grandparents and many of your grandparents didn’t have.
My friend Magic Man (“Shake and Bake!”) took his children to Colorado to visit their maternal grandma this summer. Grandma, he said, is not ready to be on the “Hoarders” TV show — not yet — but her domain does represent an organized chaos. Included in the 8-tracks and Life magazines is every board-type game Magic Man’s wife played when she was little.
Included in the stack of Clue and Battleship and Rook cards was Twister. Remember Twister? Big red, yellow, green, and blue dots. Spaced in a rectangle. You spin the spin thing and the spin thing lands on “Left Hand, Blue” or “Right Foot, Green,” and you aim to put your required or called-for appendage onto the color. You and the people you are playing with get contorted pretzel-like, and the last one standing, so to speak, is the winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Classic.
Magic Man’s three children, not one of them yet threatening double digits, had seen such a thing. They had watched movies and played with little computers on the drive up — what can you do, stuck there in the modern back seat? But once they discovered Twister, new ballgame. Hours of fun. Without a control pad. Or electricity.
Magic Man even took a shot. He had to stretch a limb on about his third spin and felt like someone had shot him in the thigh. You generally don’t pull a muscle while playing X-Box. So there are some risks in old-school games.
The risks are worth it. My point is — and Twister is surely another game you can play inside or, as Magic Man’s kids did, on the back porch — we’ve got to get up and move around. There are fun things to do outside involving bikes and water sprinklers that today’s children won’t be exposed to if we don’t spread the love.
“But summer’s over.” WHAT?! This is north Louisiana. Summer is never really over. Unless ice is on the ground, get the kids outside.
If they buy into it, remember to tell them that if they play hide-and-seek and no one has found them inside of a calendar day, it’s best to come on out. They win. Even if they’re blonde.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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