No Gen Xer’s quest into young and dumbness would be complete without an overactive imagination. Had my father wanted to find me there was a fifty percent chance I was roaming around someplace that I shouldn’t be and thanks to a lack of cellphones the possibility of finding me was slim. The other fifty percent of the time was sharing our overactive imaginations indoors at a friend’s house. This could involve Dungeon’s and Dragons (aka D&D), the newest comic book drop, where we each bought one, read it and swapped out. Either could be an all-day affair, but there was also the rare case of Creature Double Feature having a Godzilla or Gomorra day, and we would be at whatever house had a free TV. There were only twelve channels on the cable TV where I grew up and WLVI was the king.
The overactive imagination was what made me realize my bedroom floor was slanted, and I could use a golf ball I found outside the local driving range, and my sneakers to have a makeshift pinball machine in my room. I couldn’t picture a kid today getting the hours of entertainment that did me, when it was raining too hard to run wild. Then there were also the fantasy novels that we swapped around as well. There was the hand me downs, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny, and later when we found the new ones by David Eddings, Raymond Feist, and a little later Robert Jordan, kept our minds working. I am proud to admit that while I am old and dumb, I am still addicted to fantasy and science fiction novels, just in audiobook format.
I thank JK Rowling, Angie Sage and Eoin Colfer keeping the fantasy alive in me with that bridge while I was reading to my children. On that note, if you haven’t read Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books to your kids, or grandkids, you really missed out. They were gross which made the kiddos happy, but they took everything us older folks knew about fantasy and altered it in a hilarious way keeping the adults more amused than the kids. Trust me even if you don’t have kids or grandkids, give them a go.
I was the first one in my little gang that got an Atari, so there was a stretch where my house was the place to be, even though the television in my room was black and white. My scratching to survive father got me the TV while one of my mother’s husbands got me the Atari. To be honest with you nobody cared about the color, and I think I owned that sixteen inch black and white TV longer than any other television in my fifty-five years. Didn’t even replace it until I got out of college. Usually had better things to do with my money. I wasn’t so dumb in the between the young and old versions of dumb I have displayed after all.
Basically, yes, the wild animals born in 1969, 1970 and 1971 were all a pretty unique bunch. Fifty percent of our lives were spent terrorizing the streets with our BMX bikes, skateboards, a unicycle, a pair of stilts, many baseball gloves, a few hockey sticks, and whatever food we could scrounge. There was a network of neighbors we knew would feed us on a moment’s notice, as well as the ones that left their garden hoses on the spigots for us. There were the times though when we had to be indoors, and we made the most of that too. My house was popular because my father was always working, but not very popular when the gang was hungry. Same reason basically, but those genuinely were the days to be wild animals in need of training.
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