Little things...

The weather this week has been so astoundingly wonderful, I am trying to savour every moment to remember when the swamp returns. For a week, it's been sunny, cool and dry. My house is on the chilly side, in fact. I've been bicycling to the Beach as often as possible. I feel wonderful.

Yesterday I walked across a local elementary schoolyard while the kids were out playing at recess. Three little boys, about six or seven, were playing hopscotch on the pavement. I hear so much today about the fact that kids don't play the schoolyard games we played when we were kids -- Ordinary Solitary, marbles, etc. Teachers who've been trying to revive those games blame their disappearance on the diverse ethnic backgrounds found in your average Toronto school -- but I don't get that. We learned those games from the kids who were just a little older than us, and we taught them to those who were younger. The only time games stopped being transmitted to the next group of kids was when the school outlawed them for some reason (I recall marbles disappeared that way when I was in Grade 4 or so, I can't recall why -- too much unscrupulous marble-trading, I think). I would have thought that no amount of ethnic diversity could stop that knowledge transmittal on the schoolyard.

In any case, when I was young, no self-respecting boy would ever have been caught playing hopscotch, which was decidedly a girls' game. It was refreshing to see the little boys at my local school playing the game. Perhaps it's just as well the traditions of my childhood didn't all get passed along...

This afternoon on the radio a Trinidadian man was interviewed at a bar about the soccer World Cup -- he exuberantly touted the Trinidad and Tobago soccer team, ending his little speech by saying, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it!" The announcers seemed to get a huge kick out of this exhortation, presumably thinking it a feature of Caribbean speech. I laughed out loud -- my mother used to say that all the time when I was a little girl, and she's a Canadian of German descent. I wonder where it comes from.