It's a kid's "fun center", where they can bowl, play laser tag, miniature golf, have birthday parties and so on. I've been working there these last few days and finished our part of the project on Friday. Something about the whole surreal atmosphere of the place got me to thinking about how different my childhood was compared to those that would frequent this place. Bear with me, this is not a rant about walking to school uphill both ways in a blizzard.
Visually this place was impressive. There are huge fluorescent colored paintings of dragons, unicorns, mermaids, trolls and wizards, etc. Also several larger than life statues of extra-terrestial warriors, magicians and the like scattered about. Everything was over the top and in your face; I would think smaller children would be overwhelmed and intimidated by it all, but of course older kids would eat it up!
One of my first memories of a "fun center" was playing in the sheep corral with my older brother. There were some wooden grain troughs for feeding rolled barley and a dried molasses mix to the sheep. The troughs were built with an upright strip of wood completely around the perimeter to keep the grain from falling onto the ground. We had an entirely different use for those troughs.
When my grandfather was much younger, he had a pool hall / bowling alley on the property. We had found some remnants of that enterprise in an old outbuilding near the corral. There was on old trunk that held bowling balls and pins. These weren't the modern shiny plastic and composition ones. They were made entirely out of wood, some sort of extremely dense maple. As I recall, there were various sizes of bowling balls all the way up to the adult regulation size, which was as heavy as it's modern counterpart!
It didn't take an Einstein to figure out we had all that was needed to go bowling. We'd set a bunch of pins up on one end of the grain trough and then go to the other end and roll the ball at them. There was no such thing as a gutter ball. Most of the time we got strikes.
I would venture to bet that we had just as much fun bowling as those kids will at their high-tech ( and somewhat artificial ) facility.
I still have one of the bowling pins and two different-sized bowling balls. I don't know what happened to the rest of them.
Visually this place was impressive. There are huge fluorescent colored paintings of dragons, unicorns, mermaids, trolls and wizards, etc. Also several larger than life statues of extra-terrestial warriors, magicians and the like scattered about. Everything was over the top and in your face; I would think smaller children would be overwhelmed and intimidated by it all, but of course older kids would eat it up!
One of my first memories of a "fun center" was playing in the sheep corral with my older brother. There were some wooden grain troughs for feeding rolled barley and a dried molasses mix to the sheep. The troughs were built with an upright strip of wood completely around the perimeter to keep the grain from falling onto the ground. We had an entirely different use for those troughs.
When my grandfather was much younger, he had a pool hall / bowling alley on the property. We had found some remnants of that enterprise in an old outbuilding near the corral. There was on old trunk that held bowling balls and pins. These weren't the modern shiny plastic and composition ones. They were made entirely out of wood, some sort of extremely dense maple. As I recall, there were various sizes of bowling balls all the way up to the adult regulation size, which was as heavy as it's modern counterpart!
It didn't take an Einstein to figure out we had all that was needed to go bowling. We'd set a bunch of pins up on one end of the grain trough and then go to the other end and roll the ball at them. There was no such thing as a gutter ball. Most of the time we got strikes.
I would venture to bet that we had just as much fun bowling as those kids will at their high-tech ( and somewhat artificial ) facility.
I still have one of the bowling pins and two different-sized bowling balls. I don't know what happened to the rest of them.
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ReplyDeleteIt is amazing how some people are in such need of peer approval and validation that they post this drivel in the hope that others will be enamored of them and their inane "life experiences". Don't these people have jobs? You don't know this a*****e do you? :)
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