- Watching it snow at night through my bedroom window, hoping they would cancel school the next day...
Yes! And when the Blizzard of '78 hit, wow! Our house's front yard sloped down to the parking area, but the snow sloped UP!
- Swinging as high as I could on a swing set...
Again, yes! But during the summer between 3rd & 4th grade I got too high, fell out, and broke my arm. That sucked but it did get me out of gym class for a while & taught me to be psuedo-ambidextrous.
Yes, and to a lesser extent Lincoln Logs & Erector Sets.
- My cats. Growing up I had three. One a kitten I stopped to pet on the way home from my first day as a second-grader. She followed me home and sat outside my bedroom and cried for three months until my parents finally decided to bring her in.
Ditto and an almost exact ditto on the story as well. Coming home from my newspaper route one morning, I was drinking some milk*. Saw a kitten and poured it a puddle to drink. It followed me home and we adopted it. Leo was his name. He was a tabby & an alley cat. He loved to torment the neighborhood German Shepard. We also had a Himilayan.
- Falling asleep to the sound of trucks on i-74 and freight-trains just passing through.
Ok, Merc, that means you didn't grow up in Griffith. I lived in Crawfordsville for two years as a teen; otherwise it was Indy all the way. Where are you originally from?
Now, my additions:
- Sitting on the porch, reading books. Especially when it was raining. I loved to be outside in the rain. During high school I added a shortwave radio & listened to conversations from around the world.
- Hot Wheels & Matchbox cars.
- Building igloos & snow forts in winter, then having snowball fights with the other forts.
- Watching the trees after an ice storm. How beautiful they were, even though the ice is destructive.
- Monkey bars / jungle gyms.
- 45 RPM records & AM radio. Hey, it was the 70s!
- Playing army. Usually with about 10 kids and we used the whole subdivision as our battlefield.
- Fireworks in June & early July, especially the illegal ones we always seemed to get our hands on.
- *Steve the Milkman. As mentioned above, I had a paper route. The quickest way to get to the area was to cut through the back of a grocery store. At that early hour, the delivery trucks were making their rounds. I became friends with the milk man, who of course was friends with the other delivery people. I helped him unload about 1/3rd of a semi-truck full of dairy stuff, which made his route smoother. In exchange, he gave me 'free' dairy products, OJ, Hostess snacks, and other goodies.
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- Fushigi
