Childhood: The Home Game

“Pretend you’re sad!” I commanded my brother.
“I am sad!” he whined as tears froze to his cold pink cheeks.
“But be sad without crying, you baby!” I snorted, as I worked hard to drag the dry, dead pine tree carefully, so as to preserve the few strands of tinsel that were left hanging.
I had conned my siblings into playing a little game I invented called Homeless. It was winter vacation and my mom had just thrown out the Christmas tree. My brother and I spent the three previous days building a fort in a pile of snow in the front yard. In this game, we pretended that I lived on the streets with my kids (my siblings) and we couldn’t afford a Christmas tree so we had to wait until the rich people threw their tree out before we could celebrate.
In our family, this is a tie for worst childhood game with my cousin Ben, who played Underground Railroad with his siblings and neighbors. Apparently they all fought over who got to be Harriet Tubman.
There was also the game House on Fire, which I think kids in our neighborhood played as some variant of tag, but mine was much better. Every autumn my dad threw truckloads of wood into the basement to heat the house for the winter. He would back the truck up to the lower level window and let it run while we “helped” unload it. We pretended that the exhaust of the truck was smoke from our burning house and that we had to try to get out safely (and as dramatically as possible). Running in circles, waiving our arms and screaming for help, until dad yelled at us to shut up, was our idea of fun.

I always had fun, but to this day my siblings beg to differ. They recently looked at pictures of one of the many times I made my brother be the altar boy and my little sisters be the nuns as I transformed the living room into my very own Catholic church. I once got in trouble for stealing a hymnal and service book from church so I could do the full mass when I played at home. My siblings always begged to quit as I started my sermon, so I had to tempt them by uncovering the “communion.” This usually kept their interest long enough to get through nearly the entire service.
One of my favorite games of all time was Bus Driver. I took every chair I could find in the house and lined them up in the dining room as I forced my siblings to stand outside and wait for me, the bus driver, to pick them up for school. That was it.
I can’t even begin to tell you why this was my favorite game. It is probably because one of the many career choices I chose as a child was to be a bus driver.
Looking back, I’m surprised my siblings ever played any of my games. I probably didn’t give them a choice. I might as well have been the one chasing them with a wooden spoon.