Nickel Cokes

Today marks the first day of the summer schedule for the girls. My, my, we have a lot to do this summer. Let’s see…there are classes (violence prevention, nutrition, math and reading tutoring, yoga, etc), volunteer work at the nursing home down the street, recreation time, R & R, and other things on the schedule. Add to that the summer camp and mission trip and the summer is rather filled, I think.
Some of the girls enjoyed the week between school and the summer schedule with not a lot to do. Others had a hard time keeping occupied. I know that’s sort of an age-old problem, but I guess my question is why don’t I seem to have a hard time finding something to do?
I think when we get older, one of two things happen. Either we fill our schedules faster, or we work at them slower. In either event, we have more undone stuff staring us in the face than many kids do nowadays. I long for the days I remember when I whined to my mother that I had nothing to do and the summers seemed to last forever.
We had two acres on the edge of town back then (in the late 50’s and early 60’s) and dad farmed as well as worked in plumbing and heating. We had a big garden, kept chickens and rabbits, and had fruit trees. A grain elevator was next door and a rail spur ran along our property line that served both the elevator and the county shop on down the line. A drainage ditch was just a half block from our place and many times had tadpoles, crawdads (crayfish), and other wild animals inhabiting it. A woods abutted the drainage ditch and had wonderful old, abandoned hulks of cars, piles of concrete, and other junk in it. There was plenty of opportunity to find stuff to do, productive or not.
Many days I climbed the fence that separated the elevator from our place and went over to the office and sat in there, taking in the conversation of the men who came in. Sometimes I bought a Coke out of the old vending machine…a nickel bought a 6 ½ oz bottle. I knew most of the men who came in, and enjoyed the “adult” conversations of these mostly WWII veterans.
Maybe what is wrong nowadays is that there are no more rail spurs and grain elevators in a residential area or places to keep chickens inside the city limits of most towns. Drain ditches are covered over and no longer serve as breeding grounds for animals except skunks and feral cats. There’s no longer any place where a kid can feel comfortable loafing, buying a Coke for a nickel out of a machine.
I don’t want to go back to those days, but it really is true that the bad memories seem to gradually fade as the good ones are kept. I wonder if there will be a nickel Coke machine in the grain elevator office in heaven….