Yesterday Ron described something as smelling “pickle-y” and so I immediately launched into the hand clap rhyme that begins “I went to a Chinese restaurant to buy a loaf of bread.”
Often on social media sites I’ll see someone asking how many of us can still recite our childhood phone numbers, and of course all of us in the pre-cell phone era still know them by heart along with the phone numbers of friends and neighbors, but something that smelled of pickles made me think of how I still know the words to every clapping rhyme popular with my second grade classmates.
Times have changed, of course, and I guess girls no long spend their recess on the playground clapping their hands together and chanting about Miss Lucy and her steamboat* or Miss Mary Mack and her silver buttons. The aforementioned Chinese restaurant chant was vaguely racist and utterly nonsensical. Who buys bread at a Chinese restaurant? Of course, in terms of nonsensical nothing can beat “Bobo Skee Wotten Totten” (I’m doing my best to spell this phonetically, but you have to understand this was a completely oral tradition.)
We had no internet or master reference to consult about our playground rhymes. They were passed from child to child. Sometimes you would meet kids who attended different schools and learn they had slightly different versions of these rhymes or perhaps completely different rhymes that they chanted.
Besides clapping rhymes we also had jump rope rhymes. These rhymes tended to be specific to jumping rope. In “Down by the River Where the Green Grass Grows” the number of imaginary kisses you received from a random boy in your class (whatever name was shouted out by the girls leading the chant) was determined by how many jumps you could do without messing up. While “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear” challenged you to do different tasks while also jumping rope to really test your coordination.
Do kids still jump rope on the playground? I’m sure they must, but I feel like I don’t really see this anymore. Maybe some safety monitor somewhere decided that running into a spinning rope weighted with heavy plastic beads is far too dangerous for young children.
The truth is in the early 1980s our elementary school playground was full of dangers and no one seemed all that concerned. A tall metal slide with the bare minimum of sides barely held sliding children in place. Swings with lethal metal chains were forever pinching kids’ fingers, never mind the joy of getting accidentally smashed in the face by one of those bad boys. But perhaps worst of all were the see-saws. You don’t see these anymore at playgrounds, and I’m not surprised.
First of all, there was the bone-shaking, teeth-jarring slam which would occur when the person on the other end of the see-saw decided to suddently dismount leaving you to plummet to the ground. (It was asphalt, of course—no soft wood chips for us tough 1980s kids.) Then we would play games of see-saw tag which really amped up the lethal nature of this playground equipment. In see-saw tag the person or people (that’s when things got really interesting) who were “it” could only tag someone who was on the ground. I think there were something like six see-saws. So, this would lead to some frantic see-sawing action as kids tried to avoid getting tagged and also, inevitably, to smashed fingers for whoever was stuck being “it.”
Technically there was adult supervision on the playground, but these adults tended to hang out near the school while we ran around having fun/trying to kill each other. What can I say? It was a different era. You have to remember this was at a time when young elementary school students (myself included) were expected to walk to school by ourselves.
I suppose today’s school playgrounds are much safer, but I wonder if they’re as much fun.
— Alissa
*For those who were wondering here are the words to the mildly suggestive “Miss Lucy Had a Steamboat” as recited by children in Ramsey, New Jersey circa 1983:
Miss Lucy had a steamboat
The steamboat had a bell
Miss Lucy went to heaven
And the steamboat went to—
Hello, operator please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me
I’ll chop off you—
Behind the refrigerator
There was a piece of glass
Miss Lucy sat upon it
And it went right up her—
Ask me no more questions
Please tell me no more lies
The girls are in the boys’ room pulling down their—
Flies are in the meadow
The bees are in the pies
And you are in the D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, dark, dark, dark.
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: Open Throat by Henry Hoke
What I’m Watching: Abstract: The Art of Design
What I’m Listening to: “All Star” by Smash Mouth
Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com
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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
Ah, the hazardous good old days of Generation X. The secondhand smoke alone probably shortened our lives by a decade. (And sometimes primary smoke--my high school had a smoking area, which I suspect no public school has anymore.) Sometimes I think back on games like Dodgeball, where the whole point was to HIT OTHER PEOPLE, and wonder WTF. Bullying was considered part of the natural order, and seat belts were kept wedged into the crevice of the seats.
Then again, at least my classmates and I weren't crawling into sooty chimneys like Oliver Twist or losing our fingers working sixty hours a week in a factory! Trust me to end on an optimistic note :-D
Boy, this brought back many memories.