We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey.
We were just a gaggle of kids, and everybody played together and had a good time. You know how kids can be completely horrible - abusive but fun. But anyway, it was a nice childhood.
We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn.
The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.
I had tons of friends, played ball with my friends on the street, and did the normal things.
The focus of our family life was homework and what was for dinner; getting to ballet rehearsal and getting my brother to soccer.
I was the youngest of about nine boys in the neighborhood, and we played ball all the time, and I looked up to them, and they let me play around with them, and we just had a good time.
As a kid, I used to love to play baseball and be in Little League and sleep outside with my friends and do all those kind of things.
Like many kids, I was thrown into recreational soccer in my town, and from there, I grew to love it. Everywhere I went, I carried a soccer ball with me.
Other kids went out and beat each other up or played baseball, and I built electronics.