Listening to the sound of crickets while I lay in bed at night instantly takes me back to the summer breaks of my childhood in Erie, Pennsylvania before I found myself weighed down by life’s endless responsibilities. I didn’t realize it at the time but that was when I was truly the most free. I didn’t have a job…school…a husband…a house…a car…a kid…a dog…bills to pay…endless household chores…or worries about politics that my life has filled up with since. The summers before I turned 14 marked a time of freedom where big worries simply didn’t exist in my world. My time was spent how I wished. I played and did all kinds of fun things that I wanted to do in those warm summer months.
A big part of my daily life was playing various racket sports. I’d hit a tennis ball against our garage door for hours and hours making a loud bang sound every hit with the ball. If the neighbors hated it they never once complained to me or my parents about it. I got really good at aiming the ball inside certain squares on the garage door, mostly out of necessity because if I hit the ball slightly outside a square the ball would fly off sideways and I’d have to go retrieve it. We also had a paddle game on an elastic string called Jakari that was popular at the time. It was a one person game best played on the street with a weighted box that a string with a rubber ball was attached to. Our street didn’t get much through traffic so I’d place the weighted box in the middle of the road then I’d hit the ball with a wooden paddle and it would come flying back to me after extending out all the way on the elastic string. Occasionally cars would need to pass by so I’d have to pick up the box and run to the side of the road allowing them to pass. Sometimes the ball would go flying off the string after a particularly hard hit and I’d have to run down the street to retrieve it. Other racket sports my family took turns playing together were: badminton, which we played in our side yard and Pro Kadima which was a favorite beach game of ours where you tried to hit the ball as many times as you could back and forth without bouncing it. My record with my cousin once was 646.
Another thing I loved to do both on the beach and at home was gymnastics. On the beach you could find me doing cartwheel after cartwheel in the sand followed by handstands, backbends and back walkovers. At home, I remember being at the bottom of our staircase starting in a standing position then doing a handstand that flipped over onto the stairs into a sort of a backbend pose. I’d hold it for a bit and then flip back into my feet again repeating it again and again and again. I’d also do handstands up near various walls around our house holding the pose, without touching the wall if possible, for as long as I could. Outside the house on our metal swing set, I’d learned how to pull myself up on the top most bar of the swing set and spin my torso around it fearlessly.
I taught myself to juggle first with balls but then I ventured out to juggling other non typical objects when I was a bit older, such as my contact case containers and solution bottles. Weird objects to use I know, but I’d started wearing contacts somewhere around 8th grade and those items happened to be handy. Around that same time I remember teaching myself to ride a unicycle. I’m not certain I’d be able to do it now but in my childhood I mastered it enough to ride all the way down our driveway. I think at some point I even mastered juggling and riding a unicycle for a minute or two at the same time. I was, and still can be, quite persistent when I want to learn something.
This persistence was most evident when my Dad, brother and I all mastered windsurfing on Lake Erie. Learning to windsurf was no easy feat. Over and over again the 3 of us took turns balancing carefully on top of our windsurfer’s board as we hauled up the water covered sail while going up and down with the waves. When we managed to get the sail upright and not fall into the water, we’d slowly pull the sail towards our body to catch the wind and the board would slowly start moving. We’d hold our position, adjusting the sail slightly until the wind caught on the sail just right sending us shooting out into the lake. We’d go until it was time to turn the windsurfer back around again with a tack, so we could come back to shore. Tacking was challenging because you’d have to carefully manuever the mast into a position where it was luffing, balance on the board and quickly walk around the front of the mast to the opposite side of the board without falling into the water. As a beginner that was very hard to do and more often than not we’d inevitably fall into the water. In our attempts to haul the sail back out of the water the wind would push us down the shore, farther than we wished so we would sometimes end up having to swim the windsurfer back to shore and walk it back down the beach (sail positioned over our heads with the board skimming along the edge of the water). It was exhausting! Eventually we all got the jist of it and we were good enough to go out and back to the same spot in which we began.
Although most of my time was spent outdoors in the summer, I also liked to do some occasional art projects, write in my diary or bake things. As a very young teen I recall dancing with reckless abandon to my favorite songs like “Beat It” or the “What a Feeling” song from FlashDance because I too felt free when I could dance to that song feeling that absolutely anything was possible in my life. In general I laughed and smiled without restraint many times during my childhood. I was told more times than I can count how beautiful my smile was by both people I knew and from complete strangers that would say “your dimples are deep enough to dive in!” I loved it but I wasn’t at all egotistical – it was simply so much a part of me and my everyday life. I never thought twice about being complimented on my smile until I noticed the compliments dwindling as I got older and my life got harder and more responsibilities weighed me down.
Today my smile comes out on occasion, just not as often as I would like. In recent days it’s come out while playing badminton with my son, who, much to my delight, has discovered a shared love for the game. I find myself in fits of laughter with him outside sometimes after one of us makes a silly mis-hit or an impossible save or we have an especially long rally. That young free spirit girl is itching to come out more and my mission is to let her out as often as possible. I want to live with the same fearless, childlike abandon that I once had. I’m not likely to be doing backbends again over my staircase for fear of injuring myself, however, laughing, playing, creating, journaling, being in nature, and being more daring are all on my new agenda. I expect that my deep dimples WILL make a comeback 🙂