Rushing down memory lane

When I was a kid, my sister and I raced around on our bikes. We had a driveway that went half way down the block of our Mt. Airy home and it was our private domain. Well, us and the other kids on our half of the block. Not sure why the block was so clearly dissected as it was, our half and the other, but I’m sure that’s a story for a different day.

We owned that driveway. It started at one end with huge lions sitting atop large stone mountains, or so it seemed. That was our lookout, our endpoint. We never really rode around in the neighborhood, really, maybe later if we were actually going somewhere, but for play, the driveway was our world. From those lions you could fly down towards our house. Just before you got there, was a huge grassy square of land and smaller driveways that led to the backs of houses on the next street over. The other side had a line of hedges that showed all the crashes and accidents from the years.  That grassy spot was our all purpose land. We played everything there and in the yards to the houses. My yard had a swing set, long rusted and far too old to actually swing on it, another had an old playhouse from children now grown. One house had a huge concrete patio and monster dirt pile. These varying structures, the grassy square in between and the miles (hardly) of driveway provided hours of entertainment for after school or weekends. 

With the little girls who lived across the way, we played house, pioneer times, and tornado on the plains. Oh but how vivid our imaginations and how dramatic we were. As strong winds would whip up in real life, we had to gather the horses and the kin folk in our imaginary worlds to get them safe before the moms would call us to come in.

When three boys moved in next door our world morphed to include Evil Knievel and all matter of stunts and racing. Baseball turned into a contact sport, trash cans became targets to jump and bike riding turned into an extreme sport.

One house we were all in and out as if we lived there and others we never set foot in. One neighbor with girls older than us, had a three legged poodle named Rhoda. I think she might have bitten my sister once, or maybe she tried to bite her. Those girls were older and went to private school so they were in a different “play” league. And no one believed that their perfect little dog would bite anyone.

And so went so many of my afternoons growing up.  We played and played. We trick or treated to those houses and we knew just when the wild raspberries would bloom on the fence across from the grassy square.

Memories. Times gone by, people grown up and some gone for good.

Why wax nostalgic now, you might ask? It’s simple. The other day the gym I decided to shake things up. Forget my usual treadmill routine. I decided to take a turn on the elliptical. In minutes I was reduced to being a kid again, and all these memories came rushing back.

See, if there is one thing I could never do, it was ride without my hands on the handlebars. Oh, I could take one hand off and think myself cool, but I just never mastered riding hands free. Fast forward  40 years, and there I am in the gym cracking myself up.

If I took my hands off the handles on the elliptical machine, I would immediately get discombobulated. Unlike a bike, I didn’t fall off, but my legs would stop moving. When that happens, the machine directs you politely to “pedal faster.”  At this point it becomes difficult to pedal as I’m laughing that not only has my hands free skill set not changed in all these years, but now I am being admonished by my exercise machine. Now I wonder if others are glancing over wondering what’s happening to me? Is it obvious that this isn’t working for me?

I get my act together and I begin pedaling faster and all is well with the world. All of this has taken mere seconds and no one is paying a bit of attention to me. But in that brief time, I have happily pedaled down memory lane to fond thoughts of a different time and place. I am young again, flying down the driveway rushing to gather friends from far and wide deep in the midst of an imaginary tale. If only the gym was inspiring like this more often, I know I would go more.