I guess I don’t have to tell anyone near my age that we didn’t have computer games to play with when we were young. We didn’t have Smart Phones, iPhones, and iPads for communication either. How did we ever survive?
When I think of the many changes I’ve seen in my lifetime it boggles the mind. Things I now use on a daily basis, I couldn’t have imagined when I graduated from high school in 1962.
I don’t imagine many kids try to communicate these days using two tin cans and a long string. We thought it was great, although I can’t ever remember hearing anything when I put the tin can up to my ear and David or Sandra spoke into the tin can at the other end of the line. Maybe we were using the wrong size can or maybe the labels shouldn’t have been removed in order to get the right sound or vibration. Actually, it didn’t matter because we were always close enough to each other to hear what the other person was saying. I guess it didn’t take much to amuse us. If I told that story to kids today they would probably say, “Well that was dumb.” In my day, back in the Dark Ages, we thought it was a great adventure.
We had two large maple trees that stood side by side in our yard. They were so close together it looked like one gigantic tree. We used our high-tech tin can communication system to talk from one tree to the other. We did a lot of climbing around in those trees and never got hurt that I can remember, other than getting a few scrapes and bruises. I know that Ma told us to be careful and not fall out of the trees and get hurt, but she never tried to stop us from climbing trees and having fun. It was all part of the growing up process.
Those old trees became rotten and had blown down by the time our kids were old enough to climb a tree. Fortunately, we had helped Dad transplant several maples from our woods when we were young, and those trees were big enough for our kids to climb in. We were also able to attach a rope swing with a board notched on each end for a seat, just like we had in one of the old maple trees. Erik and Amy had fun climbing and swinging in those trees when we visited the farm.
I’m glad they were able to experience some of those simple pleasures that we had experienced. We never tried making a tin can telephone for them. They would probably have thought that was dumb too.
Airplanes also fascinated us when we were young. It was a big deal whenever an airplane flew over the farm, and we’d stop whatever we were doing, look up, and watch it until we couldn’t see it anymore. We must have been in the flight path of planes flying from La Crosse to Madison. The passenger planes were propeller-driven, not high-flying jets like they have today.
One day David and I decided we wanted to pretend we were piloting one of those planes. The upstairs, walk-in attic/closet in our house became our airplane. The closet was a small, cramped area that ran along one wall of the second floor. There was a small window in one end that was above the stairs. That window overlooking the stairs would become our cockpit window. The closet was dark and filled with stuff. I think our main passengers were mice that made their homes in the piles of clothes and boxes that occupied the closet.
You can’t have an airplane without an instrument panel, so we constructed them out of pieces of cardboard and drew various instruments on them. The instrument panels went by the window. We cut various lengths of tobacco laths to be our controls. Then we would sit in the cramped quarters of our cockpit and fly the plane. We were the pilot and co-pilot of course. I think we even took our cousins and friends for rides in our airplane when they visited. I’m sure they were very impressed sitting in the dark among piles of old clothes and hearing mice scampering around that weren’t real happy about their home becoming an airplane. It’s probably the only airplane that had to leave the entry door open to let in more light. Of course we also had light streaming in through our cockpit window and we had a flashlight handy too.
When we cleaned out the closet after our folks died, we found the old instrument panels for our airplane still in place. We just left them where they were. They looked pretty crude to me now, but they were pretty impressive when we piloted that closet airplane and soared high above the clouds in our younger days.
Imagination can unlock your creativity. Whether climbing around in our home in the trees and communicating with tin cans, or soaring among the clouds in our land-locked airplane, we created worlds in our minds. There was a creativity there that can’t be found sitting in front of a computer or a TV screen. You can still enter that world of imagination anytime, and see what wonders you can create.
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