Long (Ago) Hot Summer

     "Mrs. Madigan, do you have an old pocketbook we can borrow?"  The question was from one of the older boys in the neighborhood, well, older than me anyway, who was with his friends on a long hot boring day during one of those endless summers we used to have back so many decades ago.  Back in the time when it was unheard of for there to be any out of school activities for children of any age.  Parents were not involved in the social lives of their children.  They were too busy, and there was no desire on the part of the young to interact with anyone else but other kids anyway.  Fathers worked all day and came home tired, to eat supper, read the papers and rest. Mothers mostly stayed at home all day, and managing the household was a work intensive and time consuming labor with no modern conveniences for laundry, cooking or cleaning.
     My mother had no trouble obliging with their request for an old pocketbook; everything she owned had some age to it, and one didn't, in those days, discard objects lightly.  She handed the boys one of her old purses. It was brown, rectangular with one of the straps broken, not good enough to be of use, and hope no longer held out for any repair.
   And that was, for my sister and myself, our introduction to the activity known as "playing pocketbook."   The boys tied a piece of clothesline to the intact strap of the pocketbook, a good long piece of rope. They then headed to the one place that cried out for such doings---------Rock Cut. 
    They laid the pocketbook just on the edge of the road,  climbed up to the top of the rock cut, hunkered down in the brush along the top, and waited.  As we younger kids did too from our front porch.  They waited, and we waited.  It was afternoon, and not much traffic back then, but several cars passed the forlorn purse, and  then some more cars. All passenger cars in those days.  Nobody stopped. The fake purse drop was a known entity at that time period, it seems, and drivers well aware of what bored kids did during the summer doldrums when time stood still. 
     The word was, though, that later on, a car did stop and when the rope started to pull the pocketbook away, the driver got out and chased the boys.  They were scared and retreated back into the fields behind their lookout point.  They abandoned the pocketbook. 
      We observers never got to see any of the action, but we listened to the story, a brief respite from the boredom of the drawn-out days of summer.