WHAT WAS YOUR OBSESSION?

I recently read children are obsessed with pirates and vampires. And us older folks wonder what the problem is, except of course, the P's and V's are brought forth because of television and movies. And before you shake your head at all those commericals think about what you may have been obsessed about!

Now Old Trunks lady never played pirates or vampires, but we certainly had our time of cowboys and Indians and good guy bad guy depending on just who had the black hat. If old people of today can't figure out who is good or bad, maybe my grandparents couldn't figure out why we ran around the outside of the house hiding behind trees either. BUT we did run around. And maybe most kids do today, as well. Although I have never seen the children across the street nor the boy next door outside except the day he asked if our grass was stiff, too. Meaning of course, the grass was frozen.

I remember the day when production for toys from movies came out AFTER the movie. Now, part of the hype is the toys are on the market and call the children to watch the show or to go to the movies.

For Rachel it was may things. What I remember most is the girls played "Little House on the Prairie" at lunch time at school. She also liked Barbie, so well, in fact, she dressed as Barbie for Halloween this year. Cute, Rachel. I wonder why they didn't play "Gilligan's Island", it seemed to be on 24/7.

Bud was all about "Star Wars". He wasn't much of a collector but they played the game. Kevin was Hans Solo and But was Luke Skywalker. Oh he had a few little characters but nothing like his brother, Ryen, who is a collector. Bud never played Sesame Street but you can bet he watched it many times a day. His favorite telly series was "Speed Racer".

Ryen's thing was "Masters of the Universe". We had all the characters and creatures and even designed a few extra on things we found at garage sales. Although we had a satellite dish, we kept our cable so he could watch the show at 3P in the afternoon. Yet at Halloween time, he was generally something NOT on TV or in the movies. He invented his costumes in his mind. As I told Lisa, he was a pirate and he was a vampire.

One of the things I was obsessed about was trapping a chipmunk to sell to Jon Wennberg. Grandpa actually caught him, pulled the hair off his tail, swore long and loud because the chipmunk bite him. We did play cowboys and Indians and road bikes, and climbed trees, and listened to Bozo the Clown records. When TV became part of our household, It was only on from 4-10 and it was adult programing. There was no cartoon network.

Now, as the month of December begins to fly by, our children are watching all the half hour cartoons popular when my kids were young. I don't watch "Charlie Brown's Christmas" anymore but I remember it being a really big deal that it was time set aside. Set aside in as much as the world stopped for it, not anything like homework or dishes, or anything else. We weren't that organized and my kids didn't have that much homework in grade school, nor did I--unless of course I didn't get it done in class.

So, I ask you to think about it. What was your obsession? Olaf Opseth's obviously was books. Well, that and booze. My grand father loved his roses. Grandma made mittens for anyone that had hands. Daddy wanted a barn full of horses and mother did not want the horse poop smell in the house.

We are all obsessed about something. Let's hope yours is a fancy that thrills you, don't you think so, Soozi?

e