I’m writing this the week before Christmas. Just the other afternoon my niece and nephew came over to parents place because my brother and his wife needed to do some of those super secret things one does at this time of year.
For the past couple of years both kids had been attending some kind of summer camp. I never much saw the reason for this other than to obtain some alone time. I mean if you already live on a farm with a pond and above ground pool I didn’t see much point. If one of them wanted to learn archery you have plenty of room to practice.
On this particular evening I did find a reason. I was somewhat stunned to hear my nephew wanted us to clean the pool table off in the basement so he could play a game. Given the indoor video game/device oriented life today’s kids have I was rather stunned. Of course, neither I nor my brother had shot a game on that table in decades. Like all unused flat surfaces in out of the way places any home has, the table became a shelf for long term storage. True to long term storage form most of the things should have been thrown out long ago, but, once something gets placed there it is almost immediately forgotten.
So, after supper, we went to the basement to begin the archaeological journey into the past. Even more shocking than my nephew wanting to shoot a game of pool was my mother agreeing to throw much of the stuff out. I guess now I understood why we were having such cold snowy weather?
Why did my nephew want to shoot a game of pool? The camp he went to last summer had a pool table and they taught kids to play, well, as good as kids can play at that age just learning. When it was all over I told mother “at least now you know where they will spend all of their time when they come over.”
My brother and I didn’t have all of these video games and devices kids have today. We must have spent thousands of hours shooting pool. At some point we got a removable ping pong top for the table then spent thousands of hours playing ping pong. It just kind of shocked me that kids would have any interest in such things today. Maybe there is a reason for rural kids to attend summer camp?
