Growing up on a sparsely populated street (Federal Street) left
my brothers and me with nobody to play with except each other. We had the three
of us on the weekdays and on weekends and summer vacation we also had our stepbrother
and stepsister. We did play the typical game of whiffle ball or kick ball on
occasion, but we tended to prefer games we made up.
Color ball was a favorite. We
would designate one person as the “thrower upper” and one as the “color giver”.
The color giver would assign each of the players a color. The thrower upper
would yell a color as he or she threw the ball up. If your color was chosen you
would have to catch the ball and hit someone with it. That person then became
the thrower upper and the previous thrower upper becomes the color giver. I
recently played this game with my boyfriend’s sons and it is still as fun as
when I was ten.
Another game we loved was called Monster.
When I look back at the game, I realize the game wasn’t all that fun for Matt.
Monster was a violent version of hide-and-go-seek. Matt was always the
“monster” because he was the oldest and the strongest. The rest of us would go
hide and Matt would come and find us. If you were found, Matt would drag you to
a hiding spot of his choosing. When I say drag, I mean drag. He would then
leave you there until someone found you and saved you. The game went smoothly until
Matt had captured all of us and deposited us in different hiding spots and
nobody knew. We never bothered to work out the kinks in that.
On cold or rainy days we had
board games to keep us busy. Not your typical board games for seven through ten
year olds. We had Risk, which is a game for adults about global domination. Not
exactly Candy Land. We also played a French card game called Mille Bourne. It
was actually one of our favorites even though we did not understand the French
writing on the cards. We were also probably the youngest kids in our hometown to
know how to play chess and backgammon.
Playing normal kid games just
wasn’t for us.
