Surviving your childhood
Toolbox
Mark Albury - Published: December 1, 2008
I just read an article about a product that is supposed to help protect your child's lungs from unsafe particles in the air. The TOTOBOBO mask is designed for your child to wear whenever he or she is out of the home where the air quality is suspect. The manufacturer suggests that the mask can be worn walking to school, on the school bus, and even while riding a bike.
Growing up sure is a lot different today than it was when I was a kid. We have become such a safety conscious society that we are taking all of the fun and innocence out of being young. I grew up in the pre-bike-helmet era of childhood precautions, and I'm happy to report that, aside from some small scars and a minor occasional involuntary facial twitch, I survived intact. An example of a typical day during my youth went something like this:
I would head over to my friend Jimmy Seafort's house to play. Often we would end in up in his basement. All of the houses in our New Jersey neighborhood had huge pipes running along the low ceilings with bulky cloth wrapping to keep them warm. Today, we call this type of insulation asbestos. Back in the day, it was just an amazing source for awesome billowing dust clouds that would fill the room when we beat the pipes with tennis rackets, drumsticks, or anything else we could find.
Then we would have some fun with Mr. Seafort's table saw - re-enacting James Bond scenes with GI Joes, or using an electric sander to remove nose's from Jimmy's sister's dolls. We didn't use ear or eye protection when playing with these dangerous tools. What did we know? We were only eight years old at the time. When the racket from the power tools got to be too much, Jimmy's mother would yell down to us, in a firm but loving voice, to go play in traffic. And that is exactly what we would do. We would initiate a neighborhood kickball game in the street.
When the call went out for kickball, it was like the animals in a Tarzan movie passing along information throughout the jungle. Word would spread like wildfire, and before you knew it there would be more kids in the street in front of our houses than extras in a scene from Ben Hur. Sure playing in the roadway was a little dangerous, but we were always very respectful of the cars that would drive by. Unless we had a good kick and were running the bases, we would usually step out of the way to let them pass. Only rarely did anyone get clipped by the mirror of a passing vehicle.
Eventually the fun and excitement of playing in the street would wear off, and a group of us would hop onto our bikes and head over to the local library to ride down the front steps of the building. If there were more kids that wanted to go than bikes we would find ways to adapt. It was not uncommon for one person to pedal, one to sit onto the handlebars, and another to sit on the bike's crossbar. There would be three bodies on one two-wheeled structure of tubular medal barreling down the street without protective gear or common sense.
Helmets were unheard of back in the day. The only people that wore them were motorcycle riders and astronauts. And speaking of space travel, if we ever hit a curb or unseen pothole during this trip the riders would become airborne and make a crash landing in a heap of tangled torsos and limbs. But we would shake it off, do a quick assessment of injuries and bike damage, and be back on our way in no time.
After endless trips down the hill in front of the library with the goal of getting to the bottom without crashing on the concrete steps we would head back home, and my dad would offer to take us out for cones. This gave us yet another opportunity to tempt fate as ten to 12 of us would pile into a station wagon designed to hold five passengers. My dad would jam us into the vehicle like a train station attendant stuffing Japanese commuters into a subway car. We would be on the floor of the car, sitting on each other's laps, and leaning on the back tailgate and hanging out the window for the ride down the highway three exits to get to the Dairy Queen. Safety was never a concern. A seatbelt was just something that you would wedge between the seats so it wouldn't jab you in the butt when you were sitting on it. Whenever we made a sharp turn we would roll into a mass of human bodies on one side of the car, squirming around like a knot of night crawlers. But we always got there, had some cones, and made it home safely.
Thankfully, I survived my childhood. While I recognize a need to be more safety conscious than I was in my youth, I urge everyone to keep things in perspective and not go overboard when thinking of protecting yourself. Wear a bike helmet and by all means, always buckle up. But leave the masks for the trick-or-treaters and bank robbers.
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