Childhood Games

I remember running across the schoolyard; carefree and laughing as I engaged in the ritualized combat of games like “Tag,” “Capture the Flag,” and “Avoid the Bullies.” Well, actually, they weren’t that carefree. In fact, I remember spending a lot of time being out and even more time trying to wipe grass stains off my jeans.

As a child, I had all of the grace of a hippopotamus in tap shoes and ran with the awkward lope of a three-legged jackrabbit. As an adult, I no longer have to play schoolyard games. Nobody in the office ever tries to get up a vigorous game of “Red Rover”, “Four Square” or even “Cat’s Cradle.” Instead we play “Look Busy the Boss is Coming”, “March Madness Pool” and “Hot Potato” with the Jenkins’ contract substituting for the traditional beanbag.

Which is sort of the point of childhood games. They help teach you the skills you’ll need in the real world. If it weren’t for “Hot Potato” how would you know to pawn off the Jenkins’ contract on the production team just ten minutes before legal pulls the plug?

The hours I spent playing “Freeze Tag” during my formative years were invaluable. I learned to snap-twist my body into improbable shapes like a snake on speed. This proves to be tremendously useful when my wife approaches for a stealth hug with the intent of warming her frosty palms and the ten fingercicles of doom on my tender flesh. Without my extensive “Freeze Tag” training, I’d long ago have lost large strips of back skin to frostbite.

“Hide and Seek” taught me a lot as well. Not the hiding part, particularly. I managed to find places to tuck my body out of sight, but my tendency to giggle increased proportionally with the proximity of the person doing the seeking. If they got within five feet, my attempts at self-stifling resulted in an explosive snorting noise that sounded like a warthog with hay fever. In terms of concealment, this was about as effective as a Congressperson who says “What bribe?” while carefully tucking wads of new hundred dollar bills back in the pockets of his Brooks Brothers suit.

If hiding wasn’t my thing, seeking was. Possibly because I occasionally peeked … just a little … out of the corner or one or two of my eyes while people ran off to hide. That’s not really important now, though. What is important is that given time enough I could find anyone. (In at least one case “time enough” was an hour past suppertime.)

This comes in handy with our cat, Clarence. Like most cats, his default mode is to ignore us so aggressively that we begin to doubt our own existence. Periodically he substitutes that with a pathetic, attention-seeking behavior that we like to call, “I’ve coughed up a hairball somewhere in this house and I challenge you to find it before you step in it with your bare feet.”

Clarence loves this game and can play it for hours when the mood takes him. Yes indeed, my skills as a seeker are definitely useful with a cat in the house. I’ve tried to get my wife to play, but she insists that I’m the better seeker and she’s awed by my mastery of the game.

I’m okay with that because when our kids were infants I played a low-speed variation of “Dodge Ball” with them. Whenever I noticed that they needed a fresh diaper — which, frankly, seemed to be pretty much all the time — I’d casually hand them off to my wife with a cheerful, “He wants to see you now!”

Like any good game player she got wise to my tricks and adopted new strategies to avoid getting stuck with the mess; strategies like being tied up on the phone, being busy in the kitchen, or being several miles away from the house. We eventually took to settling the matter by playing “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

One of my favorite childhood games was “Blind Man’s Bluff.” My inherent clumsiness was no longer a liability. Unlike the other players, I was already skilled at tripping over things and falling down. The blindfold barely made a difference to my playing style. So you’d think that I’d have been perfectly ready to play the grown-up, home version.

Instead of a blindfold, the grown-up version I played took place in a darkened house and was initiated when one of our children cried out in the night. I tried to convince my wife that it was her turn to get up, but she responded by pointing out that she’d gotten up the last three times. When I protested that I was tired, she responded by pointing out that I had a choice between taking my turn or losing my sleeping-in-the-house privileges.

With the preliminaries out of the way, the actual game started as I shuffled my way out the door, across the hall and through the minefield of dropped toys trying to avoid unexpected contact with furniture, anything with an edge, and objects deposited by the cat. I kept my arms extended Frankenstein-style even though none of the dangerous objects were higher than my knees. When I finally got to my children, they always seemed to be laughing. Maybe they could see in the dark better than I could.

The game we’ve played the most over the years is, of course, “House.” In this game I pretend to be a difficult, but brilliant diagnostician and my wife pretends to be an overworked hospital executive.

Not really.

We played the version of house where I played the husband, she played the wife, and our sons filled in as the children. After a quarter century, we’re pretty good at it now. Just in time for the boys to move out and start playing games of their own.