This may sound like the ramblings of ‘Old Man Ruttle’, but we had to make our own fun when we were kids.
See, I grew up as part of the last generation before cell phones really exploded and eventually became the norm for basically every kid alive, and before every person started living their lives with their heads tilted semi-permanently downward.
When I was growing up, every video game didn’t require hours of work before you could actually sit down to play and require a super-fast Internet connection to download and install all your files and updates. I’m the Nintendo generation, baby; insert, press and play within a timespan of ten seconds.
Well, unless your system was acting up, in which case you employed that tried-and-true technique of “blowing on the game or inside the Nintendo” to clear things up.
You see where I’m going with this. In some ways, there are similarities and shared interests, but at the same time, the generational gap couldn’t be further apart. So since I grew up in the time before iPhones, iPads and iDon’tWantToParticipateInActualHumanConversationAnymore products, we had to make our own fun whenever we were bored on any given Friday or Saturday night.
Some examples of the kind of ‘small town brand of fun’ that my friends and I got up to in our youth include the following:
The time Kyle, Jon and I ended up playing an odd game of ‘hide and seek’ with some girl classmates of ours, only this was with vehicles. We were in Grade 11 and enjoying the kind of rambunctious, not-all-that-mature freedom that came with getting our respective driver’s licenses. We went to the movie in Outlook that night and wound up driving around listening to tunes in Kyle’s parents’ minivan before we came across the girls in another minivan. (The family minivan was the badass choice of vehicle in our day) They were doing the same thing as us, only following a different route and taking weird detours all around Outlook. So what did we do, as immature teenage boys whose hormones were going nuts? We followed them. Or rather, we attempted to. Just as we thought we had them going down *one* street, that van of Brittany’s would pop up on *this* one. At some point, this was gonna take a turn for the possible worse, and it happened when Kyle was barreling down Tufts Crescent and forgot that he had his high-beams on. As we were shooting around one corner, Brittany’s van came around at the same time, and to this day I remember the look of “HOLY $#&!” on her face as Kyle veered around to avoid hitting them. I can remember Brittany’s face clearly because, like I said, Kyle forgot that he had his high-beam headlights on.
Another time, the guys and I were celebrating Canada Day with our very own fireworks display. I can already hear you saying, ‘Oh, I don’t like where this is headed…’ and I can confirm that you’re at least on the right track. Fortunately for us, we left that particular July 1 with all ten fingers and toes. We were behind the ball diamonds at the Rec Plex late at night and cracked open our supply of gas station pyrotechnics, marveling at all the different kinds and what they were capable of. We lit off a few and all was going well. We lit off a few more and it was turning out to be a pretty cool Canada Day “afterparty”. We lit off another one……and it proceeded to stay on the ground and sizzle before rolling its unfired self underneath Kyle’s car, which confirmed that we had parked way too close.
“HIT THE FREAKING DECK!!!” I shrieked as we ducked for cover, only I certainly didn’t say ‘freaking’ at the time. There was indeed an ‘f’ and a word that ends in ‘king’, but the vowels need to be replaced in this instance.
Luckily, Kyle’s car did not blow up like in a cool action scene straight out of an 80’s buddy cop movie, but we did have a potential problem on our hands since this particular firework was the kind that shoots balls of colorful pyro. Not quite a big, show-closing mortar-type, but still kind of big. We couldn’t exactly grab it to point it upward, so we basically had to watch as it shot sideways across the grass and exploded against some wooden boards around the ball diamond. I’m not sure if they left big black burn marks behind because this was the dead of night, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Believe it or not, kids, this was ‘fun’ to us back in our day. Oh sure, today’s ultra-PC, overly-sensitive society might label it ‘moronic’ and ‘near-death as one could be’, but hey, we lived to tell the tale.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
