Things I Miss

All this war and bad stuff going on in this world of ours sometimes make me long for my younger days when the most important thing in my life was that the sun was out and the school bell rang ending my day. With this in mind, here are a few things I really miss about those days when I was too young to care about "adult things":

Cocoa Pebbles: Every morning -- and I mean every morning -- I sat down at the breakfast table at the house where I grew up and had a bowl or two of this delicious cereal. Many an a.m. this meal took me from comatose to, well, less comatose.

Street football: Weekdays were spent playing football on Albermarle Road in White Plains. Many of the neighborhood kids would play. Telephone poles marked the end zones. The curbs were out-of-bounds. Three receptions was an automatic first down. And no one got hit by a car.

The "Island": Across the street from my house was a triangular plot of land that was mostly grass, except for some bushes in one corner and a pair of crab apple trees to one side. We called it the island. My father and I would play catch here was I was learning baseball. I played many a ballgame there with friends. And we played tackle football games there every weekend. Let me tell you -- getting tackled and falling onto a crab apple hurts like hell.

Sundays: Our Sunday football games always ended at three. That's when we all went home for dinner. Rigatoni with meatballs and sausage and Mom's pot of gravy was the menu. Nothing beat it.

Superhero games: Yep, I played with dolls. I had 'em all too: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Thing, Green Arrow... I even had all the Star Trek dolls with an Enterprise control room, complete with Kirk's chair and a transporter to beam down the Trek guys. Heck, I even had Starsky and Hutch dolls.

Star Wars dolls: Those too. Man, I miss that.

Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels: I can't tell you how many times my best friend and I used to race those cars across the basement floor.

The smells: The cigarette smell I could do without. Also, the dump near our house on a hot and muggy day was pretty awful. But the rest... garlic frying in oil, the sweetness of beer on my Uncle Bill's breath, my grandmother's ginger snap gravy -- it all made me feel safe.

Pinochle: I never played the game in my life. But I remember my father playing with my uncles and grandfather. It was the mysterious "man" game of cards that I longed to watch and learn.

The Sound: I think I was always on Long Island Sound. My father had a boat on it. My best friend's family had a house in Bayville, LI. I went to Rye Beach and Playland, both on the shores of the Sound. I'm such a sea addict today because of it.

Storytellers: I grew up with the best of them. I really did. Some of them you know -- Alex Haley, Norman Mailer, Cleveland Amory and Dotson Rader were all guests at my house. But there were others, like "Uncle" Bill Murray, my father's best friend. And Uncle Bill Theile, owner of the sweet beer breath, who told me stories of World War II and how he got his Purple Heart. My grandfather and grandmother would tell us about all their vacations to exotic places like Egypt and Sicily and Malta. And, of course, my father, who shared with me his life stories, plus stories he'd learned from his grandmother.

A few blogs ago, I mentioned how the good old days weren't all that good. Maybe it all has to do with how you look at it.