Stroll with me....

Stroll with me.... close your eyes.... and go back... before the Internet... before bombings, aids, herpes before semiautomatics and crack... before SEGA or Super Nintendo ... way back! I'm talking about sitting on the compound wall just chatting away with your friends during the summer vacations...about hide-and-go-seek; poison-and-medicine. Lunch boxes with a thermos ... hot cocoa, going home for lunch, cheap candy from the store, hopscotch, butterscotch, hula hoops and sunflower seeds, wax lips and mustaches, and mud-pies that never went bad but dried up so soon you had to keep messing around in the mud, and later got chided at home for dirtying your clothes.... Remember ????

• When nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids arrived home from school.
• When a tenner was decent allowance.
• When you'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny.
• Climbing trees, making castles and kappe-goodoos in the sand, cops and robbers, staring at clouds, jumping on the bed, pillow fights, ribbon candy, walking to the movie theater, running till you were out of breath, laughing so hard that your stomach hurt...remember that?
• What about the girl who dotted her i's with hearts? (that was before that stupid smiley face i've adopted now)!
• The Stroll, popcorn balls and the smell of school and paste?
• When it was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents.
• When the worst thing you could do at school was flunk a test or chew gum
• Remember lying on your back on the grass with your friends and saying things like "That cloud looks like a..." And playing a game with no adults needed to enforce the rules.

And, with all our progress, don't you just wish, that just once, you could slip back in time and savour the slower pace...and share it with the children of today? Do you still remember Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy, The Twins at St.Clares, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Series of Titles by Enid Blyton... As well as the summers filled with bike rides, playing with the frisbees and the yo-yo's, shuttle badminton games, visits to the pool ... and eating Grampowder mixed with sugar and grated-coconut from the palm of your hand. There, didn't that feel good? Just to lean back and say: "Yeah...I remember......."