Tagged! If You Read This Consider Yourself Tagged Too!

Rhu tagged me on my other blog and I had such fun remembering I thought I'd put what I wrote here too. Btw, I don't always post exactly the same thing on each blog, sometimes I'll put an idea or an entry just on the one and not on the other. Xanga gets read more but I love the layout of this one and so, I keep them both. Anyway-enjoy!


Your Longest Running Game Played as a Child


That would have to be one simply entitled First Ones though not First Ones the Movie, sadly. First Ones prime players were my brother David and myself though it often included Lloyd, his best friend when we lived in New Jersey, and Kelly who was Lloyd's sister and my best friend too. First Ones was a game only to be played outside, and was best played in the Summer when the daylight hours were long and there was nothing to keep us from staying out from after breakfast to twilight with only a brief intermission for a scarfed lunch of cheese sandwiches. The gist of the game was this; Dave and I (and Kelly and Lloyd half the time) were the advanced scouts of a people coming to Earth. We were to make notes and take samples and send back the reports and things to the oncoming ships so the others would know what to find when they arrived. We were equipped with hover-bikes (our bikes) which ''flew'' so high over the buildings that they looked , from our point of view, like the pebbles variation in the pavement of our street, and 'pocket recorders' conveniently were invisible to everyone but ourselves. Had you happened upon us during around of First Ones you might have seen our hov-bikes abandoned haphazardly by the curb (we weren't good at landing them all the time) and the two of us or the four of us on our knees, waving our pocket recorders over thick clusters of clover in someone's front lawn. One would be carefully extracting one clover, stem, roots, leaves, everything and even the dirt cluster around it and placing it into a Tupperware (TM) container for further analysis, another would pull out a small and deadly weapon that had been disguised as a squirt gun, and the other two would be making notes in little Mead (TM) spiral bound note books, the kind that our teachers required us to keep in school to keep assignments straight. We collected all kinds of flora and fauna (as you no doubt can guess) as well as insects, interesting rocks, and occasionally small toads or snails. What I remember most about the game is the way we would talk with one another. Here's a rough out of a conversation:

Me: Commander, look what do you think that odd building is sir?" *points to our own house*

Dave: I'm not sure, Captain but I believe it might be an old type of prison or trash dump. Let's go and see, but be careful.

Me: Commander, what is this marvel? *Points to a tree*

Dave: Oh, that is according to our research called a Poodle. The people who live here keep them as pets and sometimes eat them.

Me. Commander, we are being watched, I can feel it. To our bikes!

All cars were enemy craft that were trying to beat us to earth and to stop our ships from coming and we had to race like mad down the sidewalks and to our driveway which was the only place we could transmit to the oncoming ships from, and any people we met were to be smiled at and then immediately mind-wiped with our deadly weapons which had that one other setting. There was 'kill' and there was 'mindwipe' but no stun.

This game could be played anywhere and usually was. We'd play it on our street, we'd play it on Kelly and Lloyd's street which was a cul-de-sac and we'd play it when we came to visit our Grandparents in another state. We played it too with our new friends when we moved. It was hours and hour of fun and we could play it off of our bikes too, we would play it in the wood behind our house and also in the park that backed up to the wood. It was played in the fall and the spring as well, and sometimes if we felt especially bored with snow ball fights and snow men, in the winter, but my richest memories are the ones that took place in the height of the summer when all the world was ripe for imagination it seemed and there were adventures to be had everywhere.