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I have never been able to keep a pollywog long enough to watch it grow into a frog. But it’s not because I haven’t tried.
In the old high school (affectionately known as the “pink prison” – who had the idea of painting a high school pink?), Along the edges of the football field, were puddles of red mud mud. packed with pollywogs galore.
We would take our jars and look for the ones that had back legs so we wouldn’t have to wait for the eternity it would take for the frog to develop. But that never happened. They are still dead. Guess we didn’t have the talent to breed a pollywog. Pollywogacide!
And while we were going to be in high school, it made sense that we would take our old, half-strung tennis rackets to try and play tennis. But we also had to have bullets. Think about it. It’s a lot for a child to wear. Pints of pints, tennis rackets and tennis balls.
And we’ve never heard of using a bag – it was long before backpacks were invented. Well, long before they got popular and plentiful, let me put it that way. But we still had our hands full.
But not for long because our idea of playing tennis was not to throw the ball back and forth, but to hit it over the fence into the hill on which the courts were supported. God forbid, everything in our city was built on level ground. Why go against nature? I’m sure it was easier not to.
So after we lost all our balls, we would go around the fences and start beating the big bushes to try to find them. There was a lot of undergrowth in the very slope and poison oak, which we always seemed to have no matter how hard we tried to avoid it. But we still found plenty of balls thrown high over the fence, the owners of which didn’t have the determined energy or experience that Easter egg hunters like ourselves had to pursue them.
We always found a lot of them, but we couldn’t carry them all, so we made a pile, which always seemed to be gone the next time we came to play our version of tennis. So when we were relying on not having to carry balls and taking extra pots instead, we always had to hit the adjacent hill first to get us something to hit the hill again. Do you see a model starting to develop? No more death for the pollywogs and an imminent death of the poison oak.
It was really cool when we realized you could rollerblade on the tennis court, because everything was paved, no rocks, and guess what? It was level! But we soon discovered that it was frowned upon by “real” tennis players, due to the possible damage it could cause to the courts.
So we took our skates with us, because after all, they were really easy to hide, tied together and slung; we thought we had them hidden well, anyway. But they were easy to transport, which added to a long afternoon trip on a day of creative, action-packed play, safely in Dunsmuir Canyon, my hometown.
Marilyn White lives in Medford.
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