" Many delightful games we played around the grave of little
Josephine.
Wherever childhood found us we played, and out of our environment and
often in spite of it, lived in a delightful world of our own into which
no grownup ever really entered. Now, you and I, grownup, walk along the
sidewalks of San Francisco and all we see under our calloused old feet
is a sidewalk. But to children even a sidewalk blossoms with
possibilities. Who but a child invented: "Step on a crack, you break
your mother's back." Only the other day I saw a kiddie avoiding every
crack and muttering some incantation as he walked along.
And out of the sidewalk grew all the different types of kiddie kars and
coasters that are so prevalent. I saw a whole load of children zipping
down a steep San Francisco hill the other day much as we children
coasted down winter hills on wicked "double rippers." A hill and gravity
and a lot of kids, what possibilities. And out of the sidewalk have
evolved those nameless explosives that have been so popular over the
recent Fourth. A row of kids sitting on a curb, one of them darts out to
the car track, a car comes, great expectancy from the kids, terrific
noise, annoyed looks on the faces of sour adults, unbounded joy from a
row of kids sitting on the curb.
Recently I saw a tomboy who had organized the children in her block, and
had confiscated an alley between two straight gray houses, and I don't
know what the game was but it entailed trips on a car down the alley and
a very bossy motorman, and "turns," over which everyone quarreled.
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