When I was little, I loved playing on the trampoline. At first my family didn’t have a trampoline but we were really good friends with our neighbors who had one. We would go over there and play with them all the time and have a blast, but the thing is that a lot of the games we’d play were really dangerous.
First of all, back when I was younger the trampolines with nets weren’t really a thing. I knew one person that had a trampoline with a net, but it was definitely unusual. I remember being so irritated by the net on the trampoline because in my mind it took half the fun out of the experience. Screw safety! Where’s the fun in jumping around when there isn’t the constant possibility of an untimely death?
Anyway, one of our favorite games to play was called Mummy’s Alive. If you haven’t heard of it the game is a little bit like Marco Polo. So basically, you have one person who is IT and they begin the game by lying in the center of the trampoline on their back with their arms crossed over their chest like a mummy, hence the name. Then the other players would begin the game by chanting, “Mu-Mmy’s A-Live,” as they bounce the person in the middle as high as they can. After the ritual is complete the mummy is awakened and ready to seek it’s victims. The only thing is that the mummy had a severe handicap. It was blind. Yep playing the person who was IT you had to wander around on the ever-moving ground of the trampoline and try to tag someone while your friends bounced you about.
The game was really fun but also pretty dangerous. Now people would do their best to keep the mummy safe on the trampoline but sometimes the mummy would be so certain of your location and would lounge out at nobody and even at times fall off the trampoline. I actually always had great admiration for mummies who wiped out and fell off the trampoline, because it showed that they really weren’t peaking. Many people peaked in Mummy’s Alive, but it defiantly made the game less fun and whenever anyone was suspected of peaking the rest of the players would be very vocal about the blatant cheating.
Mummy’s Alive was by far my favorite game, but another game we played was called Popcorn and this game could be really lame or completely terrifying based on who was playing it. So the rules of Popcorn are simple. Basically, you have one person who curls up into a ball and then the rest try to bounce them enough that they can no longer hold onto their ball shape and are forced to pop open. This game was particularly terrifying when played with bigger kids, especially my oldest brother Christopher. Chris is ten years older than me so if I was like 6 or 7 he’d be a huge 16/17 year old boy who could just destroy me. I also was pretty good at staying in my crunched up fetal position as I got launched ridiculously high in the air. I’m really competitive so I always did my best, but when it came to Christopher’s bounces sometimes, I broke quickly out of the sheer terror from how high I was getting or I’d simply hit the trampoline so hard after being bounced so high that I just could possible stay in a ball. I also on occasion would be bounced at just the wrong angle that I was launched off of the trampoline and popped open in a panic as I tried not to die as I hit the ground. This game was made even more dangerous when at times multiple people would be popcorn cornels at the same time. This tended to decrease the height you could be bounced, but you then also had the added danger of potentially smashing into the other popcorn cornels. I really don’t know how I avoided getting seriously injured playing games like this.
I remember one I was particularly little I was playing on the trampoline with big kids who played pretty rough. In this instance I remember being launched off of the trampoline and hitting the ground right on my back. This knocked all the wind out of me, which if you don’t know is a terrifying and painful occurrence where you simply can’t breathe because all the air is just squashed out of you as your fragile little body hits the dirt like mine did. I think this was the first time I ever experienced this and I remember going home in tears, though usually I was much more resilient.
Another time I remember being on a trampoline with so many kids all at once I was terrified that the trampoline would break under us. We probably had something like fifteen people bouncing on the same trampoline and most of them were older kids. This was another terrifying trampoline incident for me where I just held onto the edge of the trampoline for dear life as I lay on it getting shaken to pieces and hoping that no one stepped on me.
When I was in third grade, I moved away from my neighborhood with the trampoline fun, but then we got one of our very own so that we could continue the dangers. My dad often talks about how unhappy he was that we got a trampoline, because he was always worried that some kid would come over and get seriously hurt and then maybe their parents would sue us or something, or at the very least he’d feel bad about it.
When I got older, I started using the trampoline less and less. I sometimes would do flips and things but it just wasn’t the same as the good old days. One thing that I really loved was that my nephew as a little toddler loved playing on the trampoline and of course we would play carefully on it, not like how I used to play as a little kid. It was so cute to see him enjoy this thing that I had loved so much. This past summer we finally got rid of our trampoline. It was incredibly old and had some small holes in it and we were worried that it really wasn’t safe anymore. My nephew was particularly sad to see it go and I was too in an old lady sort of way remembering how things were “back in my day.”
Well it was nice while it lasted.
I guess the moral this time is mostly that kids play some dangerous games, but also the dangerous ones are usually the most fun unless someone gets seriously hurt, which for me never happened so they were almost always fun. Also playing rough a little bit helps build character and makes you indestructible, because if you can survive being launched off of a trampoline by someone ten years older than you, then you can survive anything. And lastly the sappy moral, which is to share the things you love with the one’s you care about, because it helps make them even more special.