The children of 80s… The children of the streets
Close to winter holidays I always feel
somewhat nostalgic and sentimental. Today I felt like browsing through my
childhood pictures and as a result came up with this post.
I was born in a little town Tomsk,
which is hiding in the pine forests of Siberia, Russia. When I was seven, my
family owned a two-bedroom apartment in a five-story condominium building in
a…well, let me call it uptown or sleeping quarters. The building was the exact
copy of dozens or even hundreds of other buildings placed in a certain order
around the neighborhood. Those were the Soviet times. Everything had to look
the same – buildings, clothes, furniture, cars. People were deprived of
choices. The choices were made for them by the caring communist government. But
despite of certain weirdness and in some cases even absurdity, I always
remembered those times fondly. That was my childhood and those were great
times: fun and active, free and happy, barefoot-and-loose-hair kind of times!
We were the kids of 80s, “the
children of the streets.” We spent an enormous amount of time playing outside.
In summer, when there was no school and the weather was warm and nice, we were
out all the time. Our parents had to make tons of efforts to drag us back home
for lunch or dinner or any other legitimate reason (or at least as they thought
it was).
Almost every kid had a bicycle and
we were riding our bikes pretty far from home. I mean we were riding bikes
alone, with no adult supervision, with no cell phones in case of emergency and
our parents having no clue where we were. Being an adult now, I realize how
dangerous it might have been (in today’s America those parents would probably
be sued and found guilty for negligence), but it was a normal occasion back then.
And for us, kids – this freedom was happiness.
In the 80s kids didn’t have many
toys to play with; we used our creativity instead. One of the games we played
was to make buried treasures. We would find some kind of a paper illustration,
like a candy wrapper, and a piece of broken glass and we would bury the paper
with glass on top. Later, we would find the places where we buried the treasure
and we would dig a hole just to check, whether our treasure was still there. It
looked sort of cool, like a little piece of art under the glass.
Another game we played was called
“the grocery store.” This one was rather simple. The dummy of a counter was
built of any found around stuff, like bricks or wooden boards. The food was
represented with stones, leaves, grass, seeds and anything else we could come
up with that reminded a particular kind of food. There was one or two
salespeople and the rest of the kids were customers. The money was nothing more
than the leaves of the trees. When someone was short with money, he would run
to the nearest tree to pick some more and was good to go. Those were the good
times indeed!
In summer there were always a lot
of flowers in our neighborhood. Every house had little yards in front of the
balconies of the first floors. The owners of those first floor apartments were
usually in charge of gardening and keeping the yards beautiful. So they did
and, to the delight of children, the yards were full of blooming flowers of all
different kinds. Flowers were usually girls’ domain and girls used to invent
many games with this requisite. My favorite was “the beauty salon” and my
favorite part was to make a manicure with flower petals. This is quite easy and
fun. You choose a flower to your liking, pick the petals, dip one tip of each
petal into water and place it on your nail. Once done – you can’t touch
anything or do anything to prevent harm to your new beautiful nails, just like
after a real manicure. Once we did our nails, we would walk around the neighborhood
feeling gorgeous and lady like, having simple talks and being overall fancy.
By the time it was getting dark we
were generally supposed to come home or at least to play near the house we
lived in. It was a common thing when someone’s mom would come out to the
balcony and scream out loud, “Masha, hooome!” The kid would reply something
like, “I am coming, Mooom!” and without a move continue the game. In a few
minutes the situation would repeat itself, and then it would repeat again.
Finally, the desperate mother would go outside, find her child and drag her or
him home paying no attention to the fierce resistance. One by one all the kids
would be taken home, except for a couple of the luckiest ones, whose parents in
the turmoil of things would forget about them until a really late hour.
Eventually, even those would go home and the yard would become completely
silent, enjoying a few resting night hours, until the sun would rise and the
intimidators of the yards would start their destructing activities all over
again.
Denny plays "grocery store" game too! I'm usually the only customer of his store though... .using leaves, stones, sticks, etc. He always comes up with this idea.
ReplyDeleteHe has it in his blood! :-)
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