The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

Senior Outlook

Discussion

March 3, 2010

Carolyn Trout: Too many snow days, too few adventures

I was just sitting there, getting my hair cut, when the stylist at the next station got a phone call.

It was her teenage daughter telling her that school had been cancelled for the next day because it was going to be too cold.

It was at that moment that it happened, this moment that I’ve known — dreaded — was going to happen someday when I got old. I morphed into my mother. Or my father. Or maybe my grandfather.

“It’s going to be cold? It’s winter! It’s supposed to be cold!”

I’m not quite sure, but my voice may have quavered a bit in the ultra-high register it had reached by the second “cold.”

The stylists all regarded me with the gentle tolerance younger people bestow on their befuddled elders.

“It will be too cold for the kids who have to wait for the bus,” one of them explained patiently.

“For crying out loud,” I said, still channeling Dad/Mom/Grandpa. “We’re raising a nation of wimps.”

Everyone smiled at me indulgently and returned to the business of snipping and blow drying and watching someone cry on Oprah. Perhaps the weeper had had to wait in the cold Chicago air for tickets to the show and was now frostbitten and near death.

Now I’m not saying that when I was a kid I had to walk two miles to school through knee high snow. Barefoot. Uphill both ways.

I won’t say that because that’s just a flat-out lie.

I always wore shoes, and any idiot knows that it couldn’t have been uphill both ways. However, it has occurred to me with increasing frequency that the childhood I remember, which is probably somewhat similar to the childhood I actually had, would qualify as medieval or even antediluvian to most kids today.

No television. Mom would throw us outside and tell us to go play. There are photos of me playing in my sandbox, bundled up to my teeth, drifts of snow in the background. Today such parental action would probably get my mother investigated by the Division of Family Services, which is too bad.

Kids today don’t know what a telephone party line was, but that’s what we had. Our number was 8F32, which translated into: Farm line No. 8, ring three shorts. There was high entertainment value in listening in on someone else’s conversation.

Mrs. Schmidt, who lived down the road and whose ring was three longs, always listened in on everyone’s conversations. She would occasionally join in, if the topic was of interest to her.

The one-room school where I attended had twelve students in eight grades. There was a boys’ privy and a girls’ privy, and it was important at recess to have a friend accompany you to the outhouse to block the hole in the wall so that Milford in the third grade couldn’t peek through.

The biggest tragedy of my first grade winter happened when I left my favorite dolly in the schoolhouse coal shed overnight and a mouse chewed off her nose. I was inconsolable and learned an important life lesson: mice are nasty and deserve to die.

The big adventure every spring was waiting until it was warm enough for our mom to let us go barefoot outside. By the end of the summer, the bottoms of our feet were impervious to all but the nastiest of sandburs.

It all sounds pretty Norman Rockwell-ish. It was, in truth, a charmed childhood. I pity the poor kids who have to stay home and watch television when it’s too cold to go to school. They don’t know what they’re missing.

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