Friday, May 31, 2013

Here Comes the Lunch Truck: Mat’s perspective

The thing I remember most about our days at Cold Spring Park was the diversity of kids on the playground. We grew up in Blackstone, Massachusetts. Throughout my entire educational career, I think there was one black student in our school, and only for a brief period of time.

At least half the kids at the park were minority, giving us our first real experience with kids from other racial backgrounds. I think this was important for us. I don’t think I would’ve grown up with prejudice in my heart regardless of my childhood experiences, but the time we spent with black and Hispanic kids at the park proved invaluable in terms of my acceptance and understanding of them as kids just like me.

That said, my brothers and sisters and I rarely strayed from one another. We were like aliens visiting another world. We knew no one. We didn’t understand the rules of this foreign land. We stuck together and played together for the most part. The idea that our parents would simply drop us off at a park in another town without supervision for the day in order to avoid purchasing us lunch was crazy.

I will also disagree with Kelli on the economic state of our family. In her post, Kelli says that “We were far from underprivileged. We were far from poor.”

I think we were closer to the poverty line than Kelli realizes.

We were free breakfast and lunch kids for our entire lives. As a teacher, I know that this alone indicates a serious level of economic struggle.

Many of the clothes that we owned were hand-me-downs, and most did not fit properly.

We didn’t have much by way of toys, sports equipment and such. I was the worst prepared Boy Scout in our troop, rarely equipped properly for the outdoor conditions. There was a weekend in February when my Scoutmaster had to pile the clothing of other Scouts on top of me to keep me warm overnight because my sleeping back and winter clothing were not suitable for the cold, winter nights.

Band trips, Boy Scout trips and any other event that required money was almost always paid for through some scholarship program funded by other parents. When I spent time in New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island with friends and their families on vacation, I was never sent with a single dollar.

I can count the number of times we ate in a restaurant as children on one hand.

We were recipients of enormous blocks of cheese from the WIC program. Government cheese. The sign of poverty if I ever saw it.

Inexplicably, my parents seemed to have enough money to travel to the Caribbean and the Poconos. They had enough money to go out on Friday and Saturday, leaving their nine year old son in charge of four younger brothers and sisters until 2:00 in the morning.

My parents might not have been poor, but the kids were.

Not destitute, mind you. Not impoverished. But poor.

It should also be noted that we thankfully did not spend every summer at Cold Spring Park. It might’ve been just one. Two at the most.

Kelli was also right about our home. It was an adventureland for kids. In addition to the fields surrounding our home and the pool and the barn, there were huge swaths of forest behind out home that we explored regularly. There were crumbling basements from ancient, burned out homes, cow ponds, swamps, a cave and endless fields of tall grass. We could ride our bikes almost anywhere in town and beyond by the time we were ten-years-old. Our generation might’ve been the last to be sent outdoors at the crack of dawn with the expectation that you would only return for lunch and dinner. The freedom that we enjoyed as children would be unheard of today. I tell my students about the lack of parental supervision and organized play that I enjoyed as a child and they cannot believe it.

Cold Spring Park put a damper on that freedom for a time, but thankfully not for long.

Oh, and the lunches were terrible. Free, yes. But you get what you pay for.

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