The Recess Bell

I enjoyed school when I was a kid and I was even a pretty good student, but I have to confess I lived for recess. For me and my friends, there was no more welcome sound than the recess bell. We’d slap our books shut, grab our jackets and troop out to the playground for fifteen minutes of fun. Winter or summer, rain or shine, recess was spent on the playground.

I remember two things about recess. Fifteen minutes seemed like a loooong time, and the games we played changed with the season.

We played marbles in the winter and jump rope in the spring. We had several rhyming songs for Double Dutch, but I’ve long forgotten the words to them. Red Rover and Duck, Duck, Goose were popular. Remember a game called Telephone or Grapevine? A group of children would stand in a row and the first would whisper something into the ear of the next child. The message was passed that way until the last person said what they’d heard out loud—and of course it would have been hilariously altered from the original.

My July release, Firefighter Daddy, was inspired by the William R. DeAvilla school, a block and a half from the Haight-Ashbury intersection in San Francisco.


The school’s paved playground still has numerous painted playground courts, and they’re even visible from Google’s satellite maps! (Click on the marker and zoom in.)


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One of them is a hopscotch court, and it became an important theme in the story. One of my favorite scenes in the book takes place on that playground, where the hero’s seven-year-old daughter teaches him how to play hopscotch. As I wrote that scene, I wondered...do children today still play games on the playground? I hope so.

What were your favorite childhood games? Did you or will you teach them to your kids? Grandkids?

Happy reading!

Until next time,
Lee
The Writer Side of Life
Firefighter Daddy available now!