When We Were the Neighborhood Kids

Thank you to the Hoot Owl kids, for a childhood no one could replace, for the endless nights and the weirdest memories.

I miss the days when we were the kids on our bikes that people were swerving around. I miss the days where “I’ll meet you at PJ’s for dinner after practice” was “I’ll walk over to your house tonight and we can all play jailbreak”.

I miss the days when we were Tigers and not Renegade Alumni. There’s something different about growing up when you had such a blessed childhood. Kids these days will never understand a real game of jailbreak because they’re all long boarding to Wawa or walking around Medford Lakes.

I miss the days when it was cool to just hangout on the playground of our old elementary school, or play games like jailbreak/manhunt/Red Rover in our backyards for hours on hours until our parents told us to come home for dinner and we would just go back after we were finished. When everyone could hangout with everyone, no matter what grade we were in, or who we were best friends with. We could bring anyone into our group, but we were ultimately the Hoot Owl Kids.

The Hoot Owl Kids was my childhood and I couldn’t have been more fortunate to have a better group of friends to grow up with. And even to this day, no matter how much we grew up, no matter how much we drifted apart and made new friends and found new interests, we all remember that we were each other’s childhood.

We still talked to each other as we passed each other in the halls of Shawnee and at graduation we all still made the effort to see each other for the slightest second before and after the ceremony. The parents still know us as the little kids who ran around from Maine to Ohio to Trail to Whitebirch (Trail).

The parents still keep in touch and no matter how many years pass in between the young ones the memories are still there. I miss the days where we would start hanging out at 11am and spend the whole day until sometimes even 12am the next day with each other. Those days would follow one another and I don’t think I ever got sick of you guys. Soon enough jailbreak and riding bikes turned into bonfires and new faces, which turned into going out to eat after sports practices because we finally had our licenses.

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