Popsicles in the alley

When I was just a young boy, maybe 7 or 8, we played outside all day long and never really paid much attention to the time unless our stomachs told us it was time to eat.  After eating I would immediately go back outside to play with my buddies.  Well one evening after supper I met up with Jim and Frank, we hung out didn’t do anything particularly interesting or exciting just goofed off.  We checked to see how much money we had and decided if we pooled it together there was enough to buy some popsicles so of course we did. 

We lived in the city (Walnut Park), which was a blue collar neighborhood where kids roamed free without concern and many neighbors became friends.  There were streets and alleys behind the houses which is where you would find us most of the time.  We would walk all over town using the alleys instead of streets even when we were alone, sometimes the alleys were scary but we did it anyway, it is just the way it was.  Anyway I got sidetracked, after we bought the popsicles we sat in the alley to eat them (where else would we go) and sat around telling stories.  As I previously said we frequently lost track of time as we did that night.  Little did we know that our parents had been looking all over for us and were just about ready to call the police, because it was 10:00 pm and we should have been home long ago.  

Our parents weren’t as familiar with the alleys as we were so that was not the first place they looked, if at all.  In fact as I remember it we were discovered as we walked out of the alley on our way back home to a bit of hysterical screaming and hollering, but our explanation that we were just eating popsicles did not satisfy our parents.  Obviously, our parents were scared and nervous and they told us what we did was dangerous but popsicles aren’t dangerous, unless you eat a couple dozen, I guess they were talking about something else, adults were hard to figure out.