Childhood memories

Alex’s post brought back some childhood memories. At school, in sixth and seventh grade, we played a game called “Bombardment,” where you wailed the ball at the other kid’s head, as hard as you could.  If a kid shied away from the ball, the gym teacher laughed at him.

After school, there was a game called, appropriately, “Kill the guy”; now it’s an on-line game.

I played Little League for seven years.  One day during practice I was in the outfield and I missed a catch and the ball smashed into my eye.  It hurt!  And it bruised.  I sat down for a while but was back out on the field for the next session.  I didn’t go home and no one called my mother.  The coach asked “Are you OK?”

One day a poor girl in the Girl Scouts was walking around and selling cookies, when a young man lured her into his house and raped and killed her, a few blocks from our house in Hillsdale.  They organized a Frankenstein-like village hunt, found the girl’s body, and traced it back to the guy, who was sent to jail and remains there to this day.  This didn’t change any of the local norms.

Maybe it’s still all like this, I cannot say.

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