Since the latest wave of arctic and what they describe as Siberian air struck the area last Saturday, I haven’t ventured out a lot. Oh, I got out and went to church Saturday evening so I wouldn’t have to get up quite so early Sunday.
After the sun came back out Sunday morning, my wife Pat and I ran a couple of errands. We even got out Monday morning out of necessity. Other than that, we’ve stayed pretty well inside.
I’ve worked quite a bit during that time since it was smarter to be inside staying warm rather than braving the below freezing temps and wind chills in the teens on the outside.
With that, I’ve had some time to sit and think back from the time of when I was a kid and how times and things have changed throughout the years.
It seemed so simple back then when I young. I can remember spending quite a bit time with both sets of grandparents.
My kindergarten year I walked to school since it was no farther than a block away. There was a Dairy Queen around the corner from my dad’s parents where we walked to and I always got a chocolate dip cone.
A Safeway store was across the street and down less than a full block from where they lived.
The girl I was most fond of that kindergarten year was named Sue. But since dad remarried that July, about 2½ years after my mother had passed away due to leukemia, we no longer lived with that set of grandparents and moved within two or three blocks of my other grandparents since he married my mother’s sister.
I never saw Sue again after that and she lived just down the street from grandparents’ home.
That move put us within a few blocks of where I went to first and second grade and except for bad weather days again walked to school in the morning and back to my mom’s parents in the afternoon waiting for mother and dad to pick me after work.
I met a girl named Linda at school and we liked each other quite a bit. I moved again towards the end of my second grade year, this time quite a ways away. She and I stayed in touch for a long time as I attended third through eighth grade at another school.
We actually went to the same high school and remained friends throughout those four years but we never dated.
Guess what I liked best during the years from when I began kindergarten through the eighth grade is I could walk to school until third grade and then I could ride my bike, weather permitting, from then through my years before I entered high school.
The streets and most all of the neighborhoods were much safer than they are today. Kids no longer walk to school if there is much distance at all. About the farthest they have to go is from where they catch a bus in the morning and from where they are dropped back off after school.
I know times have changed throughout the years and lots of good has come from them. But life just seems a lot more complicated for kids today than when I was growing up.
And I enjoy now and then taking a journey back to the times of many years ago.