At Week’s End: Finding ways to stay occupied

“Chilly out,” I said as way of a greeting.
“Chilly!,” the clerk grumbled. “It isn’t chilly, it’s cold!”
I had no argument. I snatched up an egg-biscuit, and high-tailed it for my car, which I’d left running to get the heater to a fever pitch.
As I drove away, I thought about how kids today have so many options to while away time if they decide it’s just too blooming cold to venture outdoors — TV, computers, iPads, cell phones, the list goes beyond what I even know.
Wasn’t that way for kids of the ’40s and ’50s sequestered indoors during an Arctic siege.
Our choices of electronic devices were radio, with a gaggle of serials aimed at kids, and a party-line phone that often had the operator — a real person — monitoring conversations, along with anyone else who heard the ring.
Depending on your imagination there were a few other things that could fill the hours. Two of my favorites were reading and assembling puzzles that eventually covered the top of a fold-out card table.
A puzzle of 1,000 or so pieces, many hardly distinguishable one from another, kept me occupied for hours. I’d sometimes spend all of a day just putting together a border and the first row or two, learning, Mom said, patience and concentration. The toughest to assemble was of a sailing ship, with billowing clouds and the vessel plowing through waves. Great frustration was to end up with a missing piece.
Dad, who reached maturity during the Great Depression, occasionally came up with a few things to occupy my time.
When snow was on the ground, he convinced me catching birds would be a sterling way to occupy myself, and take me out from under foot of four adults — parents and grandparents — also kept indoors by winter weather.
First off, he found an old box. A stick under one edge holding it aloft was attached to a string fed through a small opening under a window. Bread crumbs were the enticement for famished birds.
My mission was to sit quietly and wait for them to follow the trail of crumbs under the box. Then, I’d jerk the string to trap one or two, only to be loosed for another round — and, they kept coming back.
Having read about “Bring ’Em Back Alive” by Frank Buck, who collected African animals for American zoos, I fashioned myself as his protege and one Christmas even asked for a pith helmet — which I got and still have.