BIRDS, BALLS & SHOES

I had a dream last night about playing croquet. Where that dream came from (other than from my subconscious, I expect) I don't have a clue. I hadn't been thinking about the game, the equipment, the rules, or .....well, I had been thinking about my little brother's birthday which comes up this month, so maybe I had my inner tuner tuned to family things and my brain just incorporated something into my dream that was from my childhood years.

We owned a house in Long Beach that had a big back yard. The lot itself was quite good sized for being in a city, and the house sat near a front corner, leaving lots of room on one side and in the back. There also was a vacant lot next to the big side that my dad also owned. We moved into the house in 1945. In those days, croquet, badminton and horseshoes were things that families did on the weekends to have fun.

Mother and Dad bought a croquet set for the family to use and for the most part it stayed up all summer long, ready for playing whenever the mood hit. I have a warm fuzzy feeling when I think back on those times when my mom and dad would invite my sis and me to play a game with them. My sister did not have such warm fuzzy feelings. She said later she hated it. However, the reason she hated it was that she was a poor loser. She was born with a gene that went into overdrive the minute anything didn't go her way. She personalized every misplaced shot - the grass was too tall for her ball to roll correctly, the croquet mallet was too long or too short, someone moved in her field of vision and caused her to flinch, thus making the ball go cockamamie. From her view, it wasn't possible that she made a poor shot, and as often as not after the second or third "mistake," she threw the mallet on the ground and stormed off in a snit. Most of the time that was when my Uncle Bill, who lived with us, would step in and take her place. I watched the "big people" play and learned a lot from them. I will have to give my sister credit, she kept coming back for more, tantrums and all, but many years after the fact she admitted she hated the game.

The side of the house was set up for badminton. That was my mother's favorite game. She said in high school (back in the 1920s) all the girls played badminton. In the '40s and '50s she and her sisters and sisters-in-law often gathered at our house on a Saturday afternoon for a game with the shuttlecock, which was called a "bird," and the "racket." As I think back on it, the games consisted mostly of missed birds and hysterical laughter. It is strange to remember that our parents were in their late 20's and early 30's then. They were young and strong like "kids" today of that age are. They were not the aging people that now remain in our minds about how our parents looked.

Mother tried to teach my sister and me how to play, but as Ginnie Lou was younger than I was, it really wasn't ever a fair match up. Mother encouraged me to "let Ginnie Lou win" sometimes -- and I did, but it always rankled. There was much competition between the two of us and it was hard for me to deliberately lose. Finally mother told us not to play a game, just bat the bird back and forth, which solved the problem, but eventually our interest in badminton waned. The sisters, our moms and aunts, played on for a long time.

On the side of the house where the badminton court was set up, my father built a horseshoe court about 10 feet into the vacant lot and paralleling the long side of the property. He and the uncles cleared out all the weeds and set up a standard horseshoe court, with some wooden benches at either end. If anyone has ever been around the game of horseshoes being played, it is impossible even years later to forget the sound made when one horseshoe landed on top another one, or in the best case scenario, one got a "ringer." Once that happened, all the men hooted and hollered and carried on, with much backthumping. There were lots of uncles, so there were lots of games played in an afternoon.

Horseshoes was accompanied by beer, badminton by ice tea and croquet by soda pop. At least that was the Dobbins standard. As often as not, after the games the family sat around and shot the bull for a while and then the men lit the barbecue and did up hamburgers while the women got everything else ready.

In those early years there were not all that many kids. I was the oldest cousin, then my cousin Shirlee and then my sister Ginnie Lou, all born within a 2-1/2 year span. The next batch of cousins were a few years down the road, so the three of us girls spent lots of time together.

Also during those years there was no television, so whatever fun we had, it was fun of our own making. Emulating what our parents did often provided ideas for our own fun, and that included devising a game of cards we called "Rekop" patterned after our parents' Saturday evening poker games. (You'll note that our game is "poker" spelled backwards.) None of our folks had much money at the time, and at first they played for match-sticks. Later on they played for pennies, but my sis and I thought "playing with matches" was exciting so we kept using those. Somehow it always seemed ilicit to be using the word "playing with matches" but of course being good kids, we never thought of lighting those matches.

I really can't say our growing up was stunted because we didn't have things like Baby Einstein videos to watch. Between the three of us cousins, two ended up with college degrees and one ended up with a professional career as a Veterinarian. The three of us by and large have fond memories of growing up in the 1940s and 1950. It's a different world that we live in now, harder for kids nowadays, we think, than the life we had then.

It's fun to be reminded, even in a dream, of something from the past that could conjure up such good old-fashioned recollections and pass them on to this generation.