Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: This is no room for old rompers

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Mike Peterson Published: November 13, 2011 1 minute 3 comments

Mrs. Otterloop must be thinking of life in some other world, where trees are at least 30 or 40 years old, and not spindly saplings propped up with wires and wrapped in protective tape like they are in the Cul de Sac.

Generals always want to fight the last war and parents always want to get their kids to play games of the last generation. Sometimes it works. (I mean the latter; the former hasn't worked in centuries.)

But Richard Thompson gets it right here — there are practical limits to how much old-style fun you can have in a new-style world.

And, even before you get to changing times, there are limits of changing place. I was always kind of puzzled by the old-timers' discussions of stickball, sewerball and stoopball on TV or in books, because we didn't have sewers or stoops out in the country. We had sticks. Heck, we lived in them.

I wouldn't have known where to buy a stick or a Spaldeen, even if we'd had stoops and sewers. We used baseball bats or whiffleball bats, depending on the seriousness of the game. But backyard baseball in any form is pretty much dead these days: It simply isn't practical for kids because you can't assemble the necessary numbers, even with ghost runners, when everybody is either in daycare or forbidden to leave the yard.

We sure did have leaves, though you had to either have a very indulgent father or a capable big brother if you wanted to romp in them. Most fathers got a little testy after spending a couple of hours raking the leaves only to have a bunch of damn rompers redistribute them around the yard. A big brother, on the other hand, could rake up a good pile for the explicit purpose of jumping into them.

I don't know if we ever actually romped, though we did wear rompers and were thus all dressed for the occasion, which brings to mind a classic Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown is shouting at a stressed-out Snoopy to frolic, explaining that he brought him to the park to frolic and, by golly, he was going to frolic.

We could have frolicked in the leaves, but I don't think it ever occurred to us.

"Romper Room," by the way, was something I never let the kids watch, though it's geared toward an age level where the prohibition didn't take a rule, just an effort to make sure the TV was off or tuned to something else. But I felt their relationship to TV at that age was surreal enough without someone looking through a magic mirror and announcing that she could see into our house.

Speaking of surreal, here's a song about romping (and stomping), sung by a little girl who had just turned 14 two days before this recording was made.

This is a type of romping that my mother definitely encouraged, though not when we were that young.