"Truth or Dare"

In my neck of the woods, we called it Truth, Dare, Double-dare, Promise to repeat. When I hear about kids who played some stunted version of this, calling it simply truth or dare, I think about how easy they had it.

I don’t know what the kids in your neighbourhood were like but mine were sadistic. Mostly, of course, it was the boys who elevated risk - social, physical, and mental - to unheard of levels. Where the giggle inducingly benign “I dare you to kiss Susan” became “I dare you to put your hand down the front of Susan’s pants and leave it there for the count of 10” and then count really, really, really slowly. Or, “I dare you to jump off your bike while it’s still in motion” to “I dare you to run your bike into that brick wall without using the brakes”. Yes.

Depending on who was playing on any given day, you were wise not to choose certain categories. If it was just all girls, Truth was the most dangerous, and Dare hardly registered because girls don’t care about your physical prowess; they want to humiliate you with social ostracism like making you admit you lied about something or reveal who you were in love with (girls love secrets). Pretty tame stuff, really, if you consider the alternative which was playing with boys who ALWAYS made it sexual and/or life threatening. And, yeah, I’m talking about 10 year olds.

We also played a made-up version of British Bulldog where half the players were on foot and the other half rode their bikes. Those on foot got a few seconds head start to run across the playing field before those on bikes (again, the boys) came after them, punching, pushing or kicking them to the ground or simply running them over. That was fun.

And there was the game of Chicken where a kid threw an open pocket knife at your bare feet. The aim wasn’t to hit you but to throw the knife hard enough that it stuck in the ground just a few inches from your foot. If it bounced, you forfeited a turn. Haha! Yes, sometimes they missed the ground. And, also yes, everyone carried a pocket knife in the 70s.

Want some more? Murder Ball which was, as the name suggests, a murderous version of dodge ball where a direct hit to the head earned the most number of points and pulling back on the speed of the throw was frowned upon. In this case, you were out for blood.

“Red rover, red rover, send (next victim) over!” Wherein the kid called out would take a hard and fast run at a clothes line of arms, determined to break through but mostly just ending up with some body part bruised and bleeding and/or the throat constricted. Crying was optional.

We played a version of Evel Knievel that involved plywood slabs, a bicycle and a bunch of kid bodies lying down on the pavement, face up, to act as spacers over which the bike rider tried to fly without landing on them.

We didn’t have cars so we used kids

And Commandos where kids hid in bushes, up trees, in and on top of lane way garages, and the like. It was a version of hide and seek but, in this case, if you were caught, you were taken prisoner and … tortured. Yeah, that happened. I rarely played Commandos because, again, boys and sex.

Tether ball. Tag. Hopscotch. Double-dutch. Four Squares. Wall Ball. Baseball. Volleyball. Track and field. All pretty tame but not necessarily danger-free. Kids in my day lived full-on in our bodies. We were constantly testing our strength, agility, speed and limits of pain. Deep cuts, purple bruises, scrapes, casts, scars and scabs were badges of honour. They meant you’d played hard, tried and possibly failed but at least took the risk.

Getting Out Alive But Scathed

Sometimes I see people of my generation (Baby Boomer, if that wasn’t already obvious) and the one that came after it wonder how we ever made it out alive. No helmets. No knee pads. No admonishing parents or other watchful grown-ups anywhere in sight. Trees were for climbing. Rocks were for throwing. Glass was for smashing. Bikes were for zigzagging down the middle of the road. Neighborhoods and parks and alleyways were for exploring. It was unheard of to spend time indoors - your parents didn’t want you there and neither did you.

I think the very reasons that made our lives seem unsafe were also the reasons we survived. We figured out our limits and our strengths. We developed social and physical skills by trying and trying and trying and then accomplishing. Did really bad stuff ever happen? Yes, it did.

My neighbourhood was a mixture of down on their luck, middle-class professionals, and hippies. I hung out with underaged thugs: drug dealers, arsonists, cat killers, bullies, and sexual assaulters. We smoked cigarettes and lit each other’s clothes on fire. We used swear words like we’d invented them. We broke into buildings, we stole stuff. We were hoodlums. Well, okay, not me. But that’s who many of my peers were. I heard stories about “juvey hall” and tween pregnancies.

And yet, if you asked me would I prefer my own childhood to one that came after the 1980s when childhoods were spent indoors on screens, I would answer yes, without hesitation. The internet, smart phones, and social media have robbed generations of children of a childhood (and, by extension, an adulthood). The harms caused by online engagement are far worse than anything I experienced. At the very least, we could take a break from it all. We weren’t plugged into all the shit all the time all over the world.

Instead, we were sent outdoors to play … in the real world … on real grass … where other children also gathered … to throw knives at each other.