RECORD STORE TALES #1214: The Great Outdoors

Minor revelations continue to hit me in my 53rd year around the sun.  As I toil away over a hot keyboard, hammering words into the ether while Dennis DeYoung asks me “What you doin’ tonight?”, I realize something.

One reason I love summer so much is that I love working outdoors.  I always have.

Of course, I use the word “working” in the creative sense.  I don’t mean hard labor outdoors! Come on.

In my current actual job, I would work outdoors if I have the chance.  The one time I did work remotely from the cottage, it was too cold and wet to work outdoors.  Given the chance though, I will.

And given the chance, I write outdoors.  I film outdoors.  I animate outdoors.  This all began when I was a kid.

We had the best front stoop.  Oh, really it was nothing special.  It was just a concrete front stoop surrounded by driveway and grass.  But on that front stoop came the best childhood times.

Board games.  Creating drawings.  Inventing stories.  Playing music.  Eventually, hearing Maiden Japan by Iron Maiden for the first time.  Making videos.  Playing guitar.  So much went down on that front stoop.  Only meters away, on the front lawn, often unfolded great battles with GI Joe vs. Cobra.  Just more stories being invented.  It could have turned into a photostory if we had the digital technology then that we have now.

The backyard featured many more creative inventions.  More drawings, more games being invented and more stories being written.  Sometimes, even homework was completed back there.

During winter, I would go into hibernation and try to have the same adventures in the cramped indoors.  It was never the same.

I just had a memory.  In the summer of 1984, the hot new GI Joe figure to own was Zartan, the master of disguise.  Not only did he come with a slew of accessories and a small vehicle, he also changed colour in the sunlight,  Normally a light Caucasian skin tone, Zartan would turn a deep blue when exposed to sun.  Summer represented a short warm window when you could play with your GI Joe characters, and get full use of your Zartan figure.  This could not be duplicated indoors.  You had to use your Zartans in the summer!  Our front yard featured as Zartan’s home swamps for several consecutive summers.  (Especially a few years later when his brother and sister, Zandar and Zarana, were introduced into the toyline with similar colour changing features.)

Bob Schipper showed me how to make little garages for our Hotwheels cars.  We’d use twigs to build these little structures, and cover them with grass.  This eventually led to hut and trench building for our GI Joe figures.  Any base or headquarters set that Hasbro sold were not as useful to us as a handful of twigs and grass.  (Twigs with a “Y” shaped section were especially useful for building huts.)  We could dig trenches and have our figures man them with their weapons.  Any character with a bipod or tripod, such as Rock and Roll or Roadblock, worked even better in the trenches.

The only real drawback to playing outdoors was losing the small action figure accessories.  Another memory strikes.  Even younger, playing Star Wars in the front yard, probably 1978.  I lost my Sand Person’s gaffi stick somewhere in the dirt near this big birch tree in the center of our yard.  It was gone.  I imagined it would be shredded by my dad’s lawnmower and had to move on.  I utilized a wooden matchstick for the Sandman’s gaffi stick thenceforth.  Winter came.  A thick sheet of snow and ice concealed  the dirt underwhich the gaffi stick had disappeared.  Spring came, and in a funny twist, my mom found Sandman’s gaffi stick in the front flowergarden dirt.  I was ecstatic!  But this only lasted a short time, as I promptly lost it again, this time permanently.

Another summer, I made a fleet of vehicles using virtually every single brick in my Lego collection.  It started with this one cool tank and grew from there.  It is miraculous that no Lego bricks were permanently lost or shredded on the front lawn, as that is where their battles unfurled.

Sure, we played catch, threw a football, kicked a soccerball and thumped on a volleyball too.  Those aren’t the things I’m drawn to remember.  Throwing a baseball seemed more like the same thing every time.  Meanwhile, my creative adventures, either with pen & paper or action figures, were always memorable.

I wasn’t just “playing”.  Stories were being told.  Established characters were used, true to their fictional biographies and specialties.  Tangents were played out that originated in existing media. Original ideas and settings were placed into the mix and a story was enacted, often with a free direction but with certain plot setpieces pre-planned.  Perhaps I would want to incorporate a new toy or character, and so I would gear the story to their introduction or feature role.  There was so much more going on than just playing with toys.

I sit here now, as the Styx album concludes, and typing some final thoughts into my laptop.  I do this as a cool late summer breeze provides a perfect comfort, and the greens and blues that surround me feel soft and calm.  I’m just geared this way.  Put me outdoors and let me create.

It’s what I do.