A Day in the Life of Chaos

I am not sure why as we grow older and try to remember the past often our thoughts drift to our youngest age.  Perhaps it is our own psyche recognizing the importance in those formative years on how we came to know the world.  Maybe it was the most interesting part of our lives.  Perhaps it is a yearning for lost innocence.  Whatever the reason I found myself today harkening back to memories of one of the most brutal locations of a young child’s life, the playground.   For a young child the playground embodies liberation, freedom, friendship and hierarchy.  It also is an arena where it is kill or be killed.  It is a regulated pandemonium when adult supervision is minimized and like Lord of the Flies children express their dominance over the others.  It can be in games, submission or actions of deprecation.  I can still recall Todd Mueller or was it Bobby Andresen pinching my neck and forcing me to bow while they said “Bauer, bow to the emperor.” I learned early on that a key to s

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