Today was an awesome day. I got to veg out and sit on the couch all morning and watch tv. I was able to catch a Big Valley marathon on the Hallmark Channel. I was in heaven. When I was a kid, my favorite tv show was Big Valley. I would watch it every week. The Barkley family was the 60's version of the Ewings. They had everything in their big western mansion. The coolest thing to me was the fact that the Barkley women wore pants. How cool was that? Even as a little kid, I guessed that they had so much money and power, that nobody dared reprimand the women for wearing pants.
When I was a kid, we had a horse, and the kids next door had ponies. When we would ride together, we would play Big Valley. Our horse was the biggest, so I got to play mother Victoria Barkley. The other kids just had ponies, so they got to be the Barkley kids (Audra, Heath, Nick or Jarred). We had a ball.
When the weather was bad and we couldn't get out to ride our horses, I would play Big Valley indoors. I would get my big red stuffed animal dog, and tie a rope around its neck, and would sit it in front of one of the end tables. I would carefully take all of the books and things off of the table, and the climb on top of it and in an instant, it would be magically transformed into a stagecoach. I would get some of my dolls and sit them on the table with me and they would be the Barkley kids. I would sit there on top of the table for hours, just playing by myself. Mom and Grandma didn't seem to mind that I had stuffed animals and doll in the family room - as long as I was guiet and not getting into any trouble, they were cool with it.
The flood of memories came back to me this afternoon when I was watching Big Valley. I started thinking about the kids next door, and where they are in their lives right now. Between the three of them, they collectively have 10 kids, 3 grandkids, and have been through 6 marriages. But I just kept thinking of all of the fun we had when we rode our horses and played Big Valley. Nothing else mattered back then. Our parents knew we would be safe, and didn't have to worry about us getting into too much trouble. The only place we rode was in our fenced in fields, so it wasn't like we could go too far. Our parents didn't worry about someone abducting us from our own yards, nor did they worry about someone selling us drugs or anything. All we had to do was make sure we were back to the barns before supper time. If things were only that simple today.
1 comment:
What a great story! Reminds me when my friends and I played "country". There were four of us girls in my neighborhood, all about the same age. One girl had two of those big red, rubber balls with a handle that you sit on and bounce. Those were our horses. Of course that meant two of us didn't get a horse which sometimes caused for some whining. All four of us had transistor radios in various cool shapes and colors that we would tune in unison to the same radio station. That way we could listen to Jackson 5 or some of our other fave groups while we played. Back then it was WAKY or WKLO. (That was before radio was dictated by f-ing Clear Channel...don't get me started, this is a nice memory...)
Anyway, we were always sisters when we played things like Country, School, City Girls, whatever. And we'd be off down the street at Brenda's house all day long. We always knew to be home at 5:00 because supper would be sitting on the table. Thanks for bringing those memories back. What a treat.
And it is a bit bittersweet, because I think about my kids. If they were gone out of my sight all day long I'd probably issue an Amber Alert. I know there have always been "bad people" out there, maybe we're just more aware of it today, or hear more details about it on the news. But it's very sad there's so many evil predators out there, waiting to victimize our children. They will never have the freedom we had "back in the day".
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