Life's Lesson

As I grow older I tend to look back at the various stages or segments of my life and wonder which taught me the most.  Each had its moments.  Marriage taught me patience, fatherhood nurturing.  College taught me to be responsible and to take care of myself,  being a teenager taught me what it meant to become a man.  Despite all of these momentous stages one other stage stands out as the very foundation of who I am.

Nothing is more impressionable, more formative, more developmental than the playground.  That small corner of a child's world was our zone.  It was our island in Lord of the Flies.  It was the place where children interacted with each other and the pecking order, the social hierarchy was established.  There were no parents, only an attendant and like a prison guard in a tower at the fictional Nazi camp Stalag 13, there was always moment when their back was turned or the spotlight didn't shine.

Lake Otis Elementary school in Anchorage, Alaska was my proving ground.  Behind the blue tiled hallways and corridors lined with classrooms was a dusty concrete and rock strewn playground,  It was filled with an odd assortment of equipment, basketball hoops with no nets, a hill to run up and then stand breathlessly at the top and wonder why you did it to begin with.  As a child it all seemed like a disparate collection of things to keep us busy.  As I look back, I wonder if each activity had some hidden purpose.  Perhaps a nefarious one not understood by us and not recognized by our teachers.

I remember two activities that must have been designed to impart trust on our wee little minds yet in the end, went horribly array.  The first was a set of concrete pipes. They were large pipes, obviously donated by someone who had no idea what to do with them and need a tax write off.  It was spring and the end of school was nearing when I climbed atop one of them.  Kids were crawling through the inside and I sat pleased with myself and my position.  Hearing all the fun bellow I decided to have a look.  I crept over to an edge and grasping the rim lowered my head so that I could gain a clear view of the kids crawling through.  My hair dangled down and the blood went to my brain.  Suddenly out of now where I felt a push.  Another kid had seized a nearly irresistible opportunity to send me flying off the pipe in a full somersault.  Moments later I was motionless on the ground with a left arm broken in two places.  I was rushed to the nurses office and an inflatable splint was placed on my arm.  The problem was, it had a hole.  So as my mother drove me to the hospital I was forced to sit, lips locked on the valve blowing in as fast as the air was escaping out.  The cast on my arm was a cruel start to a summer that had seemed so promising.  I was lying in my bed one morning, the weather outside was sunny, birds were tweeting and mowers hummed.  My arm was suspended by a rope my father had installed above me when the door bell rang.  Moments later the child who had pushed me off the pipe appeared.  With his mother behind him he apologized for pushing me off the pipe and breaking my arm.  As a way of saying he was sorry,  he handed me a new white soft ball as a gift.  Could anything have been so cruel?

One of the more sadistic playground devices is the teeter totter.  Sure it was fun as long as everyone cooperated, however it doesn't take a child long before they discover how to abuse their playmate.  All you had to do was wait until you were on the bottom and they were on the top.  At that moment, you jump off.  The resulting crash sends your friend plummeting to the ground and as the teeter totter strikes the earth it sends a fierce concussion all the way up your spine, slamming your teeth together before it reaches your brain and leaks out your nose.

I remember another incident that while not on the playground occurred in a nearby gym.  There was a giant parachute that we would all stand around and pull tightly.  The teacher would select one student, always a cute girl, and allow them to climb on top.   We then would all start to move the parachute up and down allowing the girl to bounce like she was on a trampoline.  On one particular day, the most prissy girl in the class was picked.  Her name was Caroline Cremo and extremely pleased with herself for being selected she climbed on top of the chute and we started to bounce her.  It was sort of the child's equivalent of the trust me enough to fall backward and I will catch you professional growth activity.  Higher and higher Caroline bounced obviously pleased with herself.  Her hair flew around wildly and she had a huge smile echoing not just her pleasure but also displaying her intense feeling of superiority.  Higher... still higher Caroline bounced.  I am not sure what happened, perhaps it could be best described as a flock of birds flying together but somehow in unison the parachute shifted.  Caroline's trajectory suddenly changed and she went flying off and landed on the wooden gym floor with a loud thump.  Oh there were a thousand tears and moans of anguish but she survived to become a professional and intelligent woman.  So much for trust.

On our particular playground there were a series of tether ball polls that no one ever used.  Well no one except for my best friend Robert and I.  Tether ball is an activity where a ball hangs suspended by a rope anchored at the top of the pole.  It is batted in one direction to start off.  When it reaches the other player they hit it back.  The goal is to wind the ball around the pole so much that you are the last one to hit it before it can no longer swing. Every lunch Robert and I would play together and every time we did, I would lose.  I never beat him.  I couldn't figure out why.  I felt inferior deep inside yet every time I played I felt that might be the time that my luck would change.  It never did.  Of course now I realize the error in my ways.  I was small, Robert was tall.  A small man can't beat a tall man at tether ball.  The lesson is simple, in life there are some things you will never win.

No matter if it is today or any point in the past, adults try to exercise the best of intentions when it comes to children.  That said, when you compare the environment and codes that we live by today concerning our children it is a miracle any of us ever survived.  Today playgrounds are constructed with kid safe activities on rubberized mats or soft cedar mulch.  When I was a child it was concrete and rocks.  One organization always trying to do their best to make the school a better place, is the Parent Teacher Association or PTA.  Ours fund raised and saved for a year before proudly installing a new piece of playground equipment.  It was called "The Witches Hat" and it was their gift to the children of the school.   We had never had a new piece of playground equipment and were all excited to give it a try.  Looking on the internet I found this picture of a witches hat.  Apparently it is designed so that the kids can sit in a kind of group swing while they turn around in circles.  I make this note because when compared to this picture, something went fatefully wrong with the installation of ours.  I think they cut the chains to short.  Perhaps the person that installed it imagined the hat was on the head of a witch.  So rather then sit, we all hung on.  We would start running in unison and moments later were flying through the air as we held on for dear life, the hat spinning around a central axis.  It was a tremendous rush at first, like a roller coaster flying down a track.  This sensation continued until you couldn't hold on any more.  Kids were flying off like meteors streaking through the sky.  Dozens of crying children shooting in all directions.  In less then one week the school reluctantly removed the PTA's generous donation.  Lesson, things in life don't always go as planned.

I haven't seen a true "Monkey Bars" in years. Today, it seems like all you find is a simple kind of upside down ladder.  Kids swing along and with each grasp, threatening to pull their arms out of their sockets.  On our playground, it was a complex maze of steel pipes.  They were unpainted and ice cold in the winter.  Frost would sparkle on them like a white Christmas tree.  Todd Mueller was the king.  He could scale them in an instant and hang in any manner.  Terrified of heights I felt like a wuss compared to Todd.  I would slowly work my way through the labyrinth doing my best to secure myself to each pipe.  Falling meant personal destruction.   Of course in Alaska the monkey bars presented their own temptations.  They were the perfect eye level location for mountains of puffy white snow to collect.  Snow that was deliciously impossible for a young child to resist.  I think there should have been a monument erected next to the monkey bars similar to the Vietnam War memorial.  It would be an index to all those that lost portions of their tongues trying to lick a bit of that tasty fresh fallen snow.  I was among them.  With countless others I suffered the abject humiliation of tears streaming down my face while my tongue hung out of my mouth sealed to the cold pipe.  Several screams and wails later an adult ran into the school to retrieve a warm cup of water and returned to end the humiliation.


Winter and the play ground in Alaska went hand in hand.  After all, winter in Alaska stretches from October to April.  More time is spent tromping around in the snow than is ever spent running on grass.  Mountains of snow were shoveled and collected in piles taller then three kids combined. They  provided an irresistible destination for the King of the Mountain.   Of course when there is a King of the Mountain there are always a legion of kids ready and willing to knock them off.   The scene at the base can be one of carnage.  One day I took a header off the mountain and ended up with a concussion.  At some point during my youth our winter mountain had a Queen of the mountain.  She was a black girl named Tawana and she could kick the ass of any boy in the school.  One day Chris Congdon attempted to challenge her supremacy and ended up getting his face pounded by her.  Poor Chris, the humiliation he lived with after the event must have been unbearable.  At some point he disappeared from memory, obviously forced to move and start a new life in some childhood form of the Witness Protection Program. The playground taught us to know our place in the world.

Of course the island of the Lord of the Flies was not without some adult supervision.  Ours came in the form of an old woman who was nastier than green phlegm.  Her name was Phylis and she patrolled Stalag Lake Otis with an Iron fist.  My first serious encounter happened with her on a particularly cold day.  In Alaska it didn't matter how many degrees below zero the thermometer boasted, kids were still expected to be outside.  On one horrendously freezing day I slipped in a school door and sat quietly on a bench in a hallway attempting to warm myself and my nearly frost bitten fingers.  Phylis discovered me and ordered me outside. "How dare her," I thought.  "couldn't she just let me be?  What was I hurting?  I was just an 8 year old kid wanting to get warm.   I stood up and with obstinacy, determination and an overly inflated chest responded, "Well kiss my sweet petunia."  Moments later I was being dragged down the hallway by my ear toward the principals office.  Phylis was one of my first experiences with abject authority and later in response to another dictate I greeted her with a Nazi salute.  This resulted in another ear dragging, a trip to the principal's office and an extended lecture about who the Nazi's were. 


My school had a black janitor named Smitty.  Oh I know, today they are custodians but in those days, they were janitors.  Smitty sat in his tiny room down a long hallway buffeted by cleaning supplies and comforted by a transistor radio.  We would catch a glimpse of him when we walked by and wondered if he was insane.  He would leer at us with a frightening stare that sent chills down our spines.   We were terrified of Smitty and one day during lunch someone dropped something on the floor or was acting obnoxiously like only an elementary school age child can.  Smitty walked over to our table and reached in his pocket.  We were all frozen and watched him as he withdrew a knife and opened up the blade.  The steel glistened as he stared at us with the whites of his eyes.  He held the knife just out of sight of anyone else, sheltered by his body.  He smiled a devilish grin and displayed a gold capped tooth that glistened.  Smitty looked straight in my eyes and said in a muffled voice, "Kid, I'm going to cut your balls off one of these days." 

Life on the playground was a first challenge to survival.  It was kill or be killed.  It was six years of a developmental Attica that shaped what kind of young man or young woman you would become.  From dodge ball to teeter totters, monkey bars to pipes children made the rules.  They were the true masters of this tiny domain.  While some proved to be bullies and some leaders, the majority of us simply did our best not to have our glasses stepped on and shattered into tiny pieces.  Doing so would have made us blind.  In other words, not to become Piggy in the Lord of the Flies.