"Be the First Kid On Your Block!"

Are you mature enough to recall the old cereal commercials that had, somewhere within them, “Be the first kid on your block”?  Invariably, that comment was in regard to some toy or gizmo you could send in twenty-five cents (no stamps, please) and two box tops to get, or came already packaged somewhere inside the cereal box.  Usually, it was made of plastic or some kind of construction paper or cardboard, and lasted all of about ten minutes before something on it broke or otherwise became inoperable.

I was reminded of that phrase this weekend.  We had company in our home for a few days, so when I went to the store, I picked up several different kinds of cereal besides the ONE kind the wife and I eat.  I figured they might not care for spoon-size shredded wheat each morning, and might want something different.

When we opened one of the boxes and poured out some cereal, out came a plastic thingy wrapped in more plastic.  It took the wife unwrapping it and looking on the box to determine that it was a Sponge Bob water shooter.  Evidently, you fill the thing with about three teaspoons of water and then push the plunger.  The water shoots out a hole in the other end, ostensibly getting someone wet.

We haven’t tried it yet.  It’s laying on the pie safe in the dining area.  (Why do they call it a pie safe?  We haven’t EVER stored pies in ours…)  I admit I was tempted to stand out in our front yard with the thing and yell at the top of my lungs that I was the first kid on my block to have one.  But with my luck, a neighbor kid would come out of his or her house with a giant version of the same thing and give me a quick shower just to show me that they had one before I did.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t really sure what “my block” even was.  We lived in an unplatted part of the town.  That means that there were no streets and lots platted.  We owned about two and a half acres, and there were two or three other houses in the same unplatted area.  The place where the street (Adams Street, by the way, for those who know my home town) would have gone had there been a platted street was right through our front driveway and garage.  So I was always a little ambivalent about just who and what constituted my block.  Besides, most of the kids who were within a block or so of me didn’t care about things such as that anyway.  We were more concerned with finding crawdads, lizards, and snakes down at the drain ditch, watching the train come to bring or take cars to or from the neighboring grain elevator, or playing at the old, abandoned house we owned on part of that acreage.

Those were the days when our mothers would toss us out the door sometime in the earlier morning and call us back in for lunch (we called it dinner); then toss us out again until supper time.  Our family had a bell mounted on a pole outside that we could hear from two or three blocks away.  And when we heard it, we knew we were supposed to hightail it home.  Blocks really didn’t mean much to us back then, and the concept of child kidnapping never occurred to anyone…least of all us.  We’d use the nearest bathroom, which often was a tree, the drain ditch, or inside the barn on our property.  And once in a while, someone’s mom would poke her head out the door just to be sure no one was dead or had suffered an amputation of some kind.

“Be the first kid on your block!”  I like all the memories that come with that.  Hopefully, you have such memories as well.