all fun and games until somebody loses an eye

Dear Zsa Zsa,

So far, I've written about play as though it can only be good. That's obviously not true. Play can harm people, because what is play to one can be deadly serious to another, and because play can be destructive. Children are tremendously destructive, after all.

A story of my childhood often comes to mind whenever the subjects of play or games come up. It's a story I tell in my classes, to provide an example to consider the merits and limits of game-playing as a model of various other activities (including ethical conduct of a  professional).

In fifth grade, my cis-male-gendered friends and I played a game during recess, based on a common game boys play, where a “runner” tries to run from one base to another while two “basemen” try to tag out the runner. Basically, it’s two people playing catch, while someone else runs between them trying to avoid being tagged. It's fun for a while, but we started to get a little bored with it. What kids do when that happens is innovate.

We got to thinking: In baseball, a base runner struck by a ball is out. We had already incorporated this rule into our base-running game, so it was a simple matter to extrapolate from this rule, and come up with a game in which seven or eight of us would stand in a line against the brick wall of the school, and one or two would throw a baseball at us trying to hit us and thus tag us “out.” Sometimes we used a tennis ball, or a softball, and a couple times even a hockey puck, but for the most part we threw baseballs at one another.

The line of targets was permitted to jump, duck, or turn to one side or another. The more of us were lined up against the wall, the less space there was for evasive action, so more of us were tagged out in the first few rounds. The last man unstruck by a baseball was the winner, and the prize was the option of being a "pitcher" for the next round.

After some trial and error, we added a rule that the ball had to be aimed at the knee or lower.

I want to emphasize: No one with any supervisory responsibility ever tried to stop us from playing this game. We only stopped playing after the terrible incident when Ted Saleh struck Mark Brebberman with intent to injure. It was somehow related to the Hundred Days War, believe it or not.

(My loveliest Lauren's favorite part of this story is that we were the misfit and castoff kids. While the cool and athletic kids got to use the grassy field to play football or whatever during recess, we were relegated to the asphalt slab and the thin strip of lawn by that brick school wall. So while the supposedly tough kids played touch football on grass, we supposedly wimpy and dorky kids played on blacktop. My shins were permanently black with bruises and I always had scabs on my knees.)

There's a lesson in that, I guess. I also remember it fondly, which tells us all a thing or two about my sense of play and its limits.