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Confessions of a concrete water artist

The Associated Press story on today’s page about the fidget spinners craze is testimony to the fact that you never know what will keep kids entertained or capture their attention.

I’d never even heard about these twirling things until now, so apparently I am very much out of the what-keeps-kids-engaged loop.

I’m not sure I get what the big attraction is, but I guess that’s to be expected, coming from one who found childhood amusement in some pretty non-gadgety-non-gimmicky ways.

A bucket of water, a paintbrush and a sidewalk, for example, combined to keep me amused — or at least distracted — for periods of time.

I didn’t come up with the idea, but I guess my mother tapped in to her stash of creative genius and arrived at this no-brainer as a pretty good way to keep a little person happy for a while.

Guess what? I actually enjoyed painting the sidewalk. It gave me purpose, and I felt like a grownup painting, although I don’t believe I’d ever seen adults happy about painting come to think of it.

But with this, I was suddenly an artist with a blank concrete canvass to paint anything that came to mind.

And better yet, if I didn’t like what I’d done, there was no need for erasing.

All I had to do was wait for a little breeze or a little sunshine or both, and boom, I could start from scratch and paint something new.

Sadly, this didn’t work very well in the winter.

I’m kidding.

My mother did not send me outdoors in December to keep me busy doing this, but maybe there were times when I deserved to, and the thought crossed her mind.

I played a lot of jacks when I was little, which was good because, like painting concrete with water and a paint brush, I didn’t need anybody else around to do it.

Such amusement undertakings didn’t require a playmate.

The only down side to jacks, however, was one of them ultimately would disappear. Best case scenario? One would fall down the register in the kitchen, the best place to play jacks thanks to the linoleum floor.

The worst case scenario? It would end up under someone’s foot and a bare one at that. Sometimes my dad’s.

Ouch. Oops. And sorry, too.

Simple games are the most fun in my book.

The last time my brother Jay was visiting from Columbus, his daughter-in-law tagged along, too, and the evening entertainment ended up being a quick tutorial on how to play a game of cards called “Screw Your Neighbor.”

The basic premise of this card game is you don’t want to end up with an ace. You want to “Screw Your Neighbor” and secretly trade it with the person next to you.

He caught on very quickly, and it wasn’t long before we were really having a good laugh about it, remembering childhood card games of Old Maid — trying to be sneaky and not laugh about having the Old Maid card you were trying so desperately to get rid of.

Of course, the Old Maid card got all krinkled and corner-wrinkled in the process, so if you had the Old Maid card, everyone knew it, and you were to be avoided big time.

As a super sensitive little peep, I’m pretty sure my self-esteem took a blow thanks to that “entertainment.”

And maybe that explains why I was so content to be a sidewalk artist, no matter what the weather was.

(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and features writer for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times and community editor for the Herald-Star. She can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)

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