HISTORICAL COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER 3-10-12

Youthful Memories

How many of us have heard the children of today say they are bored? I guess the same boredom was around 50 years ago, but I don’t remember it. It seemed like there was always something to do, or learn how to do something better. We used to play baseball every day on a sand lot where the Post Office is now on Route 50. I can’t ever remember anyone hitting a home run every time they came to bat. So there was room for improvement. We would grab our gloves, bats and balls and head out to the field early in the morning and just play ball all day. I don’t even remember going home for lunch, even though I only lived two blocks away. There were many wild blackberry bushes growing there and we ate on them all day. Kids are different than adults. They haven’t gotten into the routine of breakfast, lunch and dinner yet. They just know when they are hungry. And clothes – a T-shirt sufficed from early April until the crisp winds of October would necessitate putting on a light jacket. Of course by October baseball season was over and there was no more thought of it until the next spring.

On rainy days, there were always plenty of different board games. Monopoly has been around since the 1930’s. Most of the games involved some measure of thought. Today, even the two and three year olds are walking around with some sort of electronic game. They may not have a grasp of the ultimate outcome but the flashing lights seem to have a mesmerizing effect on them. Even the old stand-bys such as Chutes and Ladders and Candyland are less visible than they were ten years ago. I’ll probably see teenagers in the doctor’s office where I go for my arthritis. Not to mention the eye problems they are going to have from viewing those tiny screens. When all is said and done, they will have solved their boredom problem with going to doctors, filling prescriptions, filling pill reminder cases and just be glad to sit painlessly for awhile.

Youth thinks it will go on forever, that they are invincible. As the old saying goes, “It’s a shame that youth is wasted on the young.” I am no different than my peers when it comes to how I’ve lived my life. Everybody goes through stages. First you are around ten and worry about nothing but what makes you happy. We fail to see how our parents have anything at all to do with it. We go through the “car stage”, the “dating stage” followed by side trips to the military or college. Somewhere in here we get married, start a family and lose track of all those things of our youth. Only after our own children are grown and gone do we regress back to the time in our life when we could anything we wanted. Only now the physical side of it plays a very important role. Things I did when I was twenty, I no longer have any desire to do. I know now that they are too dangerous.

We had no fear of our own mortality then and are only conscious of it in later life when our bodies give us gentle reminders to slow down. It is a tough place to be. But to override the loss of our youth, we gain the wisdom that only comes with time.