Going outside to play

 “I’m going outside to play.”

When I was a kid, that’s all we needed to say. Mom didn’t ask “where are you going” or “what are you going to do” or even “who are you going to play with.” We just said we were going “outside,” and she knew what that meant.

Essentially every day, we couldn’t wait to “go outside and play.” Sometimes we knew what we were going to do; generally, in my neighborhood, it meant we were going to play football or basketball or even some kind of baseball. Maybe we were going to play “army.”

Mostly we were just trying to get outside, away from the house, where we could be free for a few hours.

Our moms didn’t much care about the particulars. Oh, they did, but I think they knew we were only going to go so far, and generally we’d be with the same neighborhood kids every day, and above all they knew we’d “be back by dark” or “back by supper.” That’s how – especially in the summer – we kept track of time.

It was incredibly freeing.

And it taught us lessons that carried over for life.

For example, we learned how to play with others. A group of guys would gather to do whatever, and a set of unspoken boundaries were created around whatever we were playing. That road was the river of molten lava we could not cross; that tree was the giant we had to attack and bring down. Or we created variations of the games we knew, of football and baseball and basketball, that we could play in the limited space of a typical backyard or with tennis balls instead of basketballs or having “ghost runners” or calling right field “dead” – any hit to right field was an out, because we didn’t have enough guys to cover the entire outfield.

I can’t remember any prolonged discussion about these rules, they just seemed to happen and reach some level of consensus. And if you didn’t like a rule, you could argue, but eventually you either played by them or went home.

And nobody wanted to go home.

Guys would get hurt – fall out of a tree, or trip over rock or run into the garage door when driving to the basket that hung on the garage or take an especially vicious forearm by someone trying to be Jack Lambert in a backyard football game.

Did we cry and go home to mom? No.

First, we knew better than to let the other guys see us cry. And second, going home to mom meant we were no longer ‘outside;’ it was a loss of those few hours of freedom. Most of us would figure a way to keep playing with blood running down a shin or an arm we could barely lift over our shoulder rather than go home. Worst case, maybe you sat out a few minutes. But the site of the rest of the guys playing was usually enough to cause one to “rub some dirt on it” and get back to playing.

We would explore woods and hillsides and streams. We snuck around neighbors’ houses not to do anything other than simply see if we could indeed “sneak” without being caught. We were horses and wolves, we were major league pitchers and all-pro quarterbacks and big-game hunters tracking an elusive lion (who looked remarkably like the neighborhood stray cat).

And sometimes we just sat – on a wall, on a hill, on a rock, in a tree – and talked.

At home, inside, we were seven-year-old boys; outside, we were men. No – we were heroes. We won World Wars and made the West safe for settlers; we were Super Bowl and World Series' champions; we found treasures in streams and hid those treasures in the “forts” and treehouses that we built from scrap wood we picked up while roaming around.

It made us tough; it made us adaptable. We had to be brave when we didn't feel like it because the other kids didn't seem to be scared. And we learned to be resilient; if the neighbor told us to stay out of his yard, we changed the rules so that yard was no longer in play. It made us realize that sometimes you learn to get along with someone you don't like (later, we'd talk about those guys as "he's a friend of mine I didn't like very much") just to be able to keep doing what you really wanted to do. 

We learned delayed gratification. We usually had to build something - a tree house, a fort, a baseball field in the backyard - and that time spent building taught us to plan and work together, and that sense of accomplishment only made the game that much more fun for us all. 

We learned a little rain (sometimes a lot of rain) never hurt anybody, and never understood why any baseball game had to be called on account of weather. We found out drinking from a clear stream was better than from the kitchen sink and eating a little dirt didn't kill anybody (that we knew of). A can of Vienna sausage and some saltine crackers were as good a lunch as anything mom made, and we learned how to divide it up to share with the kids that didn't have any.

We also learned our limits. Some kids were just faster and stronger and the rest of us had to figure out ways to adapt and slow them down.   

We learned to weight options, the most basic of which was play or go home. 

I look around these days and sometimes wonder if we don't all need to remember how to "go outside and play."