(Nostalgia) Even as a little kid, I was a game master

With the new year upon us, a christmas with piles of presents for a little girl, and another one on the way VERY soon, I began waxing nostalgic for my own childhood. Those of you in my age group know exactly what I'm talking about: It seems that those of us who were kids in the Eighties actually "played pretend" with makeshift playsets, random boxes, and most of all, without a toybox full of "correct" props. A refridgerator box would last as a fort, a playhouse for my sister's friends, a tent hung over the clothesline when it wouldn't stand up anymore, and an island ready for invasion after it fell apart. We actually made shit up as we went along. We all had Atari (Nintendo in the later stages), and something odd occurred. Our parents actually restricted its usage to after dinner/homework or even on a snow day, they kicked us out of the house to play in the snow for a few hours before we were allowed back in to thaw out and play for a little while.

Like pre-teen Marines, we could adapt and overcome any real-life situation to accomodate our imaginary stories. I just wish we had written some of that shit down!

No, I don't believe I had the next Harry Potter story ready when I was 9, but the bits and pieces I recall weren't great, but they were better than half the RPG actual play stories I read online.

"The Train Set"
My family has always had a love of trains, so when I still a toddler, my Dad picked up some random HO trains, buildings, etc and had an L-shaped board in the basement. This was the focus of many a rainy day (or 100 degree summer day). The pickings were meager to work with, but a few issues of Model Railroader and I was reorganizing the town, setting up mayoral elections, new construction projects, etc... When the lumber mill arrived around Christmas, I begged my Dad for us to go to the big train meet in Allentown in February to get some more houses cheap. Why? Well, the influx of the lumber industry (and ten pack of pine trees in the far corner of the layout) meant more jobs and an increased demand for housing. And not all the workers could live above the hardware/general store. New Hot Wheels/Matchboxes meant new people in town. Roads were drawn up in chalk for a four lane highway out of town, ironically enough, removing some of the rail line to do it (Even back then, I understood the economic impact of subidizing one transportation method versus another.)

And oh, yeah, the lumber mill showed up when I was SIX. Perhaps I should have read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, instead of the newest issue of US News and World Report.

And before I knew of garden railroads, I had imaginary road and rail systems traversing the basement (the back of the basement was an industrial city), the kitchen (an archipelago with the linoleum as water), and the living room (same concept as the kitchen, but the red shag carpeting was LAVA!). The railway further meandered out of the house. Sidewalks were highways, patio blocks were malls, and the side of the yard that always flooded was a Mississippi River-style transportation hub.

I seriously wish I had written down that stuff, even if it was the elaborate writing style of a 6 to 10 year old boy.

*Star Wars "LARP-ing"* I had dozens of solo and group adventures as North Skywalker, the other orphaned son they don't talk about in the Star Wars movies. Armed with my trusty wiffleball bat, er lightsaber, my dim recollections of them run an odd style parallel to the prequels. Jedis, were cool, but all we had to work on the Old Republic were (non-internet) rumors and some old Flash Gordon serials that were still on TV from time to time. Perhaps the first two prequels really weren't made for the grown-up fans, most kids seem to like them innocently enough.

*Backyard Wargaming*
And, of course, there were the Green Army Men battles that made Normandy look like a panty raid. Those evolved into the Star Wars/G.I. Joe epic sagas, which transformed the backyards of my buddy Dave and I into strategic strongholds, minefields, and logistics? My parents didn't have the money to give me every guy I wanted, heck I whatever guys were left when they were on clearance, but they also snagged up a pile of generic figs, and best of all, Fisher-Price action figures. No, not the Little People, but actual Rescue Choppers with guys you could usually interchange with the "real" ones. We went from hours of setting up for a half hour of slugfest fighting until one of us had to go home to attacking convoys, running blockades, even third party weapons smuggling.

Yeah, I was a nerd even back then... but I still wish I had more than a few scant memories of childhood bliss. To be honest, even as I'm playing with my daughter, I hold back the desire to jot down how she's playing with the Fisher-Price Noah's animals, the family in the house, even a special guest spot by Mister Potato Head. She's just playing "house", and she's not even two!

I guess I've always been a gamemaster of some sort, more worried about how things happen and the after effects of the actions. We just didn't have blogging, digital cameras, and the step-by-step chronicling of one's life that we have today.

But perhaps that's why I can be nostalgic about those times. Like a writer who doesn't archive his work, I've forgotten how good or bad it was back then.

I just want to know why the hippo is in the tub of my daughter's doll house...