My friend Kay Parley who writes for the Wolesley Bulletin is a wise old maven. She picked up on a column I wrote about unstructured play. Essentially, I was complaining about parents who turn their children into wind-up automatons who compete in an endless round of activities that, supposedly, are exceedingly good for them. Kay understands that this kind of parenting deprives children of making joint decisions in a play world they have made for themselves alone.
Kay is a venerable lady. When I was a boy, Kay was a girl. Then, I would have avoided her like the plague, because avoiding little pigtailed monsters in skirts was the first commandment in a boy’s own bible. The second was to give the town constable work to do.
I recall that on a particular afternoon in June as many boys as could be mustered were playing in the old open-air skating rink. A ball with air in it had been surreptitiously brought from the school. We didn’t know whether it was a soccer ball, rugby ball or basketball. This didn’t matter, since we didn’t know the rules to any of these games. We made up our own rules and there was no coach or pompous league official to tell us we were wrong.
At a critical time in our game, a stranger showed up. He bellowed at us like a Brahma bull with a contorted bowel. He wanted us to desist from our pleasures and deliver handbills advertising his medicine show to each house in the village. For this, he offered each one of us a nickel. We told him our minimum price was a quarter. Like a Missouri muleskinner, he filled the air with curses and insulting references to all of our ancestors back to the dawn of time.
That night a group of small boys, scrubbed and angelic, took the very front seats at the local theatre. We weren’t stupid. We wanted all the Big People to be behind us so they couldn’t see what we intended to do. When the medicine man came on stage he announced that he and his lovely wife would show us some amazing magic tricks. We snickered like mad. The woman wasn’t lovely and we were pretty sure she wasn’t his wife, either.
We employed our whole arsenal of annoying tricks – ugly facial contortions, rude gestures annoying sounds. Jimmy knew how to fake a fart that was truly frightening. When the red-faced medicine man looked ready to explode, we stopped tormenting him, but not for long.
The medicine man and his female companion left the next day. Their inventory of the magic elixir that was an instant cure for constipation, baldness and ingrown toenails was depleted. The Canada Cafe had dusted out the bridal suite for them and even changed the bedclothes. The cook also whipped up two of his best 75-cent breakfasts. Maybe the medicine man was satisfied.
I don’t know what the medicine man was doing in my part of Saskatchewan in the Dirty Thirties. He would have felt more at home in Montana where, I have heard, there is still a law on the books which makes it legal to shoot Indians from a covered wagon.
What I do know is that I and my companions were small boys who were defending our turf. We had a little time in each day that belonged entirely to us. Big People were not supposed to intrude in it. That’s why we punished the medicine man. I don’t know what small boys can do now. The intruders are their own parents.
