Riff 105 - Trampolines, Crawdad holes, and childhood negotiation strategies

We start with the kind of childhood where entertainment meant going outside and finding out what could hurt us. We remember trampolines, lizard catching, dirt piles, snowball fights, snow forts, King of the Hill, and the roughhousing that occasionally produced injuries but somehow failed to produce a formal investigation. Parenting and grandparenting give us a different view of the same activities, especially now that we’re the people responsible for keeping the children alive. From there, we get into animals, crawfish mounds in yards, and the lessons kids pick up from being around nature. We talk about childhood toys and the things we once considered valuable, along with feeding animals and the encounters that made the outdoors its own education. Then we take everything we learned about sharing space as children and apply it to adults, which is where the system begins to break down. Traffic, parking, music in public, motorcycles, noise, approachability, and cultural differences all raise the same question: how much of public behavior is governed by actual rules, and how much depends on everybody choosing to not be jerks? By the end, we’re comparing the social cues of adulthood with the much simpler negotiations of childhood, when a dirt pile, or a snow fort could settle the agenda. After jumping on trampolines we traded King of the Hill for a much more complicated game with no clearly marked hill.