The Games We Played

I was listening recently to some prognosticators on the radio reading headlines like tea leaves and predicting the demise of yet more industries in days to come.  (I weary of this after about, oh, three minutes...)  One of the speaker’s predictions was that if things continue in a certain vein, major media will be affected just as other industries are during this economic time. 

The question was put forth about the possibility of TV being altered dramatically to become a paid service, rather than free as we’ve known it, and bemoaning what would happen if a lot of people had to do without it.

(This made me smile, sort of ironically… I’m having all sorts of thoughts about the dividing lines between necessities and luxuries and how culturally these lines seem to move back and forth in strange ways )

I easily remember a stage in my early childhood in which I felt I was so deprived if I couldn’t watch TV with the frequency and availability of “everyone else”  and the oh-so-familiar parental reply when we girls would beg to watch TV and be told either “Go outside and play,” or “if you’re bored, I can FIND something for you to do.”  I thought back to the form our play and our games took before everything became fast, visually stimulating, musical, electronic and did everything for us but digest our food.

 “Spack! Spack! Spack! Spack!”

The staccato of the Jade-ite, tiger-eye,  (or any other color combination of an array of glass marble armies) being smacked (sometimes forcefully!) hole-by-hole across a battlefield of wooden Chinese-checkerboard was the drumbeat of my childhood.  It’s a sound so familiar from my past, but I never hear it any more anywhere except in my memory– it recalls a scenario so real and familiar, I can remember the details as if it were yesterday.

My Grandma and Grandpa retired from the North to a 40 acre parcel of mostly piney woods, on a good crunchy gravel road in rural Mississippi.  They spent years carefully renovating the very small farmhouse that came with the property, a house in  which spatially every room was tiny by today’s standards and had as mixed a fragrance as a spadeful of good earth…cedar chests, the scent of furniture in various stages of refinishing, a hint of natural gas, books, canning spices, bad coffee, line-dried linens, lemon oil polish, Ivory soap and Palmolive. 

My grandparents’ steady combined efforts produced a neatly-kept yard, a very clean nondescript white house with pale grey roof, flanked by a flambouyant wisteria and daylilies on one side, and an enormous ancient oak on the other.  A hawthorne bush rubbed shoulders with a propane tank painted silver toward the back, and a small gnarled crabapple up front compared notes with her taller and more frivolous neighbor, the pink-blooming Mimosa.  Gardens and peach trees were in the back, and off at a distance were two fresh-painted white cinderblock buildings, one used as a workshop and saw sharpening shed, and the other for storing large equipment and anything else needing storing.

The house had a crawl space foundation, and when you walked across the kitchen floor, you could hear the reverberation of your footsteps echoed in the rhythmic rattling of the stove, the canner and equipment inside it, the broiler pan, the dishes stacked neatly in the cabinets.  The 1970s orange-ball-fringe trim around the edges of the white cafe curtains in the windows jauntily kept time, dancing slightly side-to-side with each footstep.  There was just no way to sneak up unawares on that kitchen.

Beside the white rounded-edge Frigidaire refrigerator, just next to the white enamel cabinet-on-wheels, was tucked a wooden gameboard of substantial dimensions…always hiding there vertically in the same few inches to the right of the fridge, the Chinese checkerboard.  Somewhere nearby was the velveteen bag of marbles, and every day at some point, whenever we were there to visit, Grandma set the game up on the square zinc-topped kitchen table situated in the middle of this space.  It was a big board, all wood, square with rounded edges of wood that elevated the flat surface up off the table by an inch or two.  The star shaped design was a very basic painted or stained design, though I’ve never seen one exactly like it since.  (I’ve looked!)

I would much rather have had a video game at that age, or some cable TV, a VCR tape back then…they were the latest and greatest entertainment innovations of that era, but they somehow eluded my own family.  If I hadn’t been in danger of being assigned a chore as a result, I’d have indulged in a good mope over it back then.  But no, there we sat playing Chinese checkers with Grandma, at the zinc-topped table, often as a break from being outside in the hottest part of the day.  We’d lean on the coolness of the metal surface, the cold iced tea in condensation-moist Marigold Lustreware tumblers pressed against our hot foreheads between sips, while the mockingbirds patrolled outside, the heat undulated off the red clay surface of the garden in waves, and the cicadas gnawed a repetitive chorus from the pines.

“Spack! Spack! Spack! Spack!”   Whew, she finally made her move.

There were long silences in between marble movement, except for occasional bickering among sisters and diplomatic studied silences from Grandma as she pondered her next strategy.  The game moved along slower than grass grew.  We’d put our heads down on our arms and sigh dramatic sighs, or make pronounced snoring noises as Grandma took grand pauses before her  next move, to study it some more.  She was the picture of stealth and longsuffering… 

When she FINALLY moved, with relief my sister and I would make our rash marble pilgrimages across the gameboard (SpackSpackSpack! Spack! SPACK!…the board lent itself to some gusto) in record time and find ourselves right back at another frozen moment in time, as Grandma said “Welll….” and then freezeframe for another aching eon to study the board again.

Our impatience never urged her into faster action.

And thus we learned…after years (Spack! Spack! Spack!)  some concentration skills (Spack! Spack! SpackSpackSpack!), some patience (SPACK.  Spack Spack.), and how to lose gracefully (because Grandma never dumbed us down and “let” us win).  And how to draw plenty of pencil cartoons and doodles on the zinc tabletop during Grandma’s long pauses.  (And study the ceramic teabag holder on the stovetop that read “I’ll hold the bag!” and the magnet on the refrigerator from the termite company that began with the slogan “The Totally Terrible Termite says..”, and the hourglass-shaped egg timer, and the cookie jar shaped like a pig, and smell the distinctive remnants of Sanka, cloves, Palmolive dish soap, leftover Tang, and fresh picked tomatoes reddening up in rows along the windowsills.)

These days, I’m pretty sure those long thoughtful silences of hers during our games may have been full of planning dinner, counting to a hundred for patience of her own to endure our silliness, or figuring out how many quarts of tomatoes she’d be getting off the tomato vines.  But now when I look back on those days…they are my favorites.

“Unplugged games” were our inside entertainment much moreso than they are today.  They probably seem downright boring to today’s media-blitzed generation.

I have different memories associated with different games.  There’s the little boy I sometimes babysat, who like to play chess, and pronounced it  “Chest.”   His mom and I, both of whom had nursed our children when they were young, chuckled and decided it was a Freudian slip. 

I have a memory from age 4 or 5, when my parents lived in a two-story rental house right down the street from Elvis’s mansion.  One of the first games my parents played with us  was Trouble (popPOP) at their big dining room table, where we had to sit on our knees to stretch across and reach the gameboard.  We loved playing it, and it was one of the few times we got to sit at the big table. 

There were the other games neighborhood kids had that we didn’t when very little…Candyland and Uncle Wiggly, Chutes and Ladders, Life.  There were of course games we played requiring no sitting or gameboard.  Imagine my amazement when I ran into one of my old childhood friends in a totally different city, on a trip to my dentist.  He was working there while in dental school, and I recognized him by his unique last name and flaming red hair.  I paused and asked him a couple questions, and when he realized we were both from the same old neighborhood, he asked how I remembered him.  I told him we used to play at his house and he would chase my sister and me and tie us to the mailbox with the jump-rope and try to kiss us (yeah, we were 5 or 6…and back then it was safe to play up and down the street).  He turned the color of his hair, heh heh

There was one of my FAVORITE childhood games for little kids that’s now no longer on the market because of the dangers it later was said to pose to very small children…Pig in the Garden…does anyone remember that one? It had a plastic sheet gameboard (or am I remembering wrong?) and though I don’t remember a lot about it (other than that I loved it), I do know it had all these tiny hard plastic pieces shaped like fruits and veggies.  It never occurred to my sister or myself to actually try to EAT one of them, but then again my sister’s preferred facial orifice in which to insert inanimate objects was her nose.  She chose run of the mill navy beans for that stunt…no gamepieces necessary.

Of course we had American Checkers, and that was the game I enjoyed playing more than Chinese Checkers.  We went on to card games, with standard decks of cards, and also kept our Old Maid cards and Authors card games going when we were “too old” for them.  Uno came in later years, then Pictionary, Scattergory. 

Monopoly??  Oh yeah!!  Fighting over which game piece to start with was the only way to kick off the game.  My sis and I played more varied games of Monopoly (known also as Ponopoly before we could pronounce it right) if the adults weren’t around.  We had no idea about the ins and outs of ownership of properties when no adults were playing the game with us, so we flagrantly made up our own rules, and the person sounding the most authoritative and making up the biggest load of hoo-ha often won.  Chase a few wins like that with some 1970s neon Koolaid or drinks from the outside waterhose (depending on where the game was staged), and who needed TV??

Some games came and went, boxes were smashed flat or lost their essentials and ended up being marked 50 cents in the annual yard sale.  Others, like marbles or Jacks or Pick-up sticks were old standbys.  The grownups stayed up late nights playing endless rounds of Dominoes, or card games.  Later, as older kids, we got into Twister and made up a lot of our own games.  Hide and seek gave way to Truth or Dare, scavenger hunts or treasure maps, or making a club where we got our own Indian names (before we knew the term Native American) and tried to see who could “scout” their way through the woods without being detected by the others.  Charades weren’t just parlor games…with a few old drapes (to make long “Rapunzel” hair) and such, there was no end of the theatrical potential to jazz things up.

We hated jigsaw puzzles.  We actually liked putting them together at first, but after those times of patiently putting together a 999 piece set of skies, castles, grass, and flowers to find that Piece # 1000 was missing…well we just had a Confetti moment with the surviving pieces and then returned them to their box…doomed to a few more years on the top shelf of the coat closet.

My first husband’s family consisted of six boys, and their childhood favorites were All-Star baseball (gameboard, and of course all the real sports broadcasts going on the radio at the time), and Yahtzee.  They got so good at Yahtzee as they grew up, and so fast at the math calculations, that any reunion even to the present involves dice rolls that seem uninterrupted and are played to the very end.  And they had their own special version of Old Maid…all six hulking adults will still gather round, shuffle and deal the Old Maid cards, and at any given point of the game that someone loses their hand, the other brothers take turns biffing the loser’s head and swapping colorful insults based on the Old Maid character names or daring them to do embarrassing stunts.

My daughter did not fully escape the genetic impact of our combined DNA…  

In her case, I’ll admit TV figured in more to her life than to mine, though most often in the form of stuff I chose for her myself.  But in comparison with most of her friends, she was relegated to the realm of her own creativity (or mine) more often than not.  And as boredom (or the spectre of being assigned a chore for claiming boredom) is the mother of invention…the games continued. 

As a young mother in the 1980s through the 90s, I ended up keeping children in my home ten or so hours a day for many years, and I can say that the art of play is the part I hope we never outgrow.  Games can seem quite old school, but educators caught on a long time ago to the fact that they’re often constructive and not just recreational.  (My daughter could whip me in a simple round of cardboard Memory Game pieces as young as 3 years old.) As serious as life can be, it takes only a momentary look at a child left to his or her imagination to begin to understand that our work, at its most basic level, can be play.

Maybe this is what motivates many of us who identify with “homesteading” and its many incarnations, to continue…because paired with all that sheer effort required to build our vision of our Best Life, there are elements requiring our creativity…and in a very real sense…Play.  In merging the two, we gain worth for our moments and keep the art of wonder from disappearing entirely from our “adult” world.

That’s not to say life is to be taken lightly, or to be treated as a gamble.  But it is to say that I’m reminded of those summer visits with one of the wisest women in my life – whose wisdom I had no way of fully appreciating at the time — and her taking time out of many of her most busy days to spend a little time in the company of her own reflections, two squirmy little girls, and a wooden gameboard…to the cadence of Spack! Spack! Spack!

 To learn  how the how the game is played, how to be gracious in accepting either victory or defeat, taking time to study things out rather than just reacting, enjoying the company of those around you (even if they’re acting a bit ridiculous and keep upsetting the table)…are just a few of the benefits besides the fun of it all.

In a world where many things seem to be a gamble these days, it’s nice to have some moments with friends or family where Risk is a board game, Scrabble is a word mix, and you can drive a car, horse, iron, or Scottie dog (with no gasoline) through a series of neighborhoods with green houses and red inns, cheap or pricey, and the only thing you need if you find yourself in trouble is a cardboard Get Out of Jail Free card.

What “unplugged” games do you remember…which ones does your family still love?

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