The upside of a kid’s downtime
So there I was, putting water in a hole.
Why? Well, there was a hole in the backyard of our San Carlos rental house, there was the hose, there was me — at age 7 with nothing better to do on summer vacation — and, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Maybe I wanted to determine how deep the hole was, how long it would take to fill up, or if the water would come out someplace else. You know, highly scientific nothing-better-to-do academic research in the style of, say, studies to determine if holding a hot beverage can make one friendlier (the answer is yes, says a 2014 University of Colorado-Boulder report). Or analyses of whether BMW drivers really are jerks (also yes, according to U.S. and U.K. research in 2013). Or studies on how there are too many studies (from a 2015 Finnish study titled “Attention Decay in Science”).
If your attention hasn’t decomposed too much by now, kindly turn it back to the hole. As you may recall, I was putting water in it.
Suddenly, in a blink, up from the bowels of the earth bubbled the amorphous, corpulent, shiny, slimy, malevolent head of a horrible underworld zombie monster. Its gooey texture resembled an engorged, mutated banana slug, but in basic black. It was not unlike the pool of sinister sludgy intelligence on that old episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” — a pre-Riker’s-beard segment titled “Skin of Evil” that sucked in more ways than one, notably for pulling the brave Lt. Tasha Yar to her early, sludgy demise.
But this was worse. It had antennae. And it was in my yard.
Clearly, I had disturbed the creature’s rest, angering it. As it rose, I freaked out, dropped the hose and left it running. I may have screamed. I don’t know. It might have been one of those dream screams where you try to yell for help and open your mouth wide but no sound comes out, just breathy gasps of terror and maybe some drool.
Now, as a rational adult, I assume the alleged entity was probably just the result of muddy water bubbling up and gleaming in the sun, the glints appearing to be eyes and antennae and elemental evilness.
My point is that summer vacation was so awesome
during my childhood, so free and unencumbered by coding camp wedged in between baseball clinics scheduled around soccer practice interrupted by forest-ninja camps and piled on top of AP summer-school classes that I could devote my drawnout days to concocting elaborate backstories for mud in a hole.
Kids who need dayplanner apps on their tablets don’t know what they’re missing. During those summers, there was the freedom to not know what day it was, to watch ridiculous amounts of “Land of the Lost” and “The Secrets of Isis,” the Isis of which was not a terrorist group but an amulet-enabled Egyptiangoddess superheroine. We could definitely use her now.
There was time to read Nancy Drew books, ride my bike over by The Creepy House with the Ivy Hedges, which could easily have been a name for a Nancy Drew book and was definitely the catalyst for soundless screams and drool. My friend Elizabeth Barnes and I started a Secret Agent Club, complete with little cardboard ID cards that we “laminated” with Saran Wrap. Our attempted mystery solving involved little more than knocking on walls in our apartment building in search of secret passageways. All we discovered was that neighbors in apartment buildings didn’t like people knocking on walls.
Yes, gone are the days of getting those huge horrible sour-grape Pixy Stix and a cola Slurpee at the 7-Eleven. Or drawing pictures of my cat, Musette, as she napped in a sunbeam. Or building cardboard-box robots. Or getting those little rubber-band-powered airplanes stuck in a tall tree.
Or putting water in a hole.
Epilogue: I never approached that corner of the backyard again, and we mercifully moved to another house. The hose may still be running. No wonder we’re in a drought.
My friend Elizabeth Barnes and I started a Secret Agent Club, complete with little cardboard ID cards that we “laminated” with Saran Wrap.