the games kids play

 Seven swamps kind of sounds like John Prine's song, Paradise.  Mr Budweiser Distributer done took it away. There is still some brush along the south side of the Orange Line, and sometimes you can spot mattresses and beat up old chairs.  I wonder where it got that name.

Farther west at 56th and St Louis was a prairie that we used to call the Saint Louis Laundry.  The story among us kids was that it had blown up in some explosion some undefined time ago.  I don't know where the story came from, I think it was just passed down from kid to kid.  I never heard an adult speaking of the St Louis Laundry.  Something had been there, there was what seemed to be a foundation of concrete overgrown with vegetation and there was a big puddle in the middle where the basement had probably been. 

It was pretty cool, we could build a rudimentary fort out of pieces of scrap, you could have a little campfire, you could toss bottles into the puddle and throw rocks at them.  And there was Indian gum, which was just some kind of dried sap inside a dried branch that didn't have any taste and didn't last very long, but it was Indian gum Man,

I guess that was another of those things that was just passed on from kid to kid, like Monopoly.  Monopoly was big around 56th and Homan.  Nobody ever read any rules, they were just passed on fro kid to kid.  Games would go on all day, like those baseball games on a corner with a 16" softball as soft as a pillow.  The four sewer lids at the angles of the corner were the bases.  Since the teams usually had only two or three players we used invisible men when we had to leave a base to hit.  Homan Avenue which was right field was an automatic out and pitcher's hands got you out if you didn't get to first base on time.  Kids would come and kids would go as the game went on from breakfast to supper, the score would be like 103 to 97.

In the summer evenings there were the games, Red Light, Paddy Cake, Statue.  There was some game where It ran off and hid somewhere and nobody was supposed to look.  And then the whole group went in the direction where IT was hiding chanting, "One o'clock and the fox ain't here, two o'clock and the fox ain't here," and so on until the fox would suddenly appear and try to tag somebody before they got back to guul (pronounced like ghoul, probably a corruption of goal, but who knows).  And foxes, what did us city kids know of foxes?

I just discovered that google knows nothing of "One o'clock and the fox ain't here."  But there is a whole field of study of kids' games passed down from kid to kid with no adult supervision.

Speaking of adult supervision, how about that Trump?  Well not so much him, he is just defective, but all those republicans who, even after he has clearly lost the election, are still storming on at his every word with any manner of debunked argument.

When that bus was sitting there just off Kedzie while the bitter crowd on the corner was freezing their keisters one of the suspicions was that the driver was taking a hammer to the cashbox where the passengers deposited their coins.  It was a thing, you could read about it in the papers.  

This seems to me to be what the republicans are doing.  Wiser heads are saying, Oh don't worry about it, there is no legal basis to what they are doing, nothing will come of this.  Those cashboxes were pretty damned sturdy so I don't know if anybody was able to actually extract cash from them so I don't know if anybody ever got money out of them.  But just because the guys with the hammers were not successful, that didn't make what they were doing ok, same with those spineless republicans.

I have been staying away from politics, but he lost the election over a month ago and he still is not gone, and probably won't be until January 20th when they drag him out kicking and screaming and crying like a baby.