Keriosity

Today there was a news story on Yahoo about a school in Massachusetts that is banning the game of Tag from being played on school grounds - for fear that kids will hurt themselves and sue the school.

Tag. Tag! Children have been playing Tag since approximately 2359 b.c. and it is even alluded to in the Bible. When Jesus said “Let the children come to me”, it was really just a ruse so he could tag them.

Schools in Wyoming and Washington have also banned Tag. And dodge-ball has been outlawed for a while now….Sigh.

The article quoted a parent who said something I totally agree with - “kids are too micromanaged today. We aren’t letting kids be kids. Another parent said “I’ve seen too many near-collisions - it’s too dangerous.” Huh? Are they playing Tag amongst speeding cars? So a kid runs into another kid and heads get bonked. Big deal. Kids get hurt. It’s what they do (in addition to getting messy, making messes, breaking stuff, and keeping a strangle-hold on what would otherwise be the best years of your life. But seriously - kids are GREAT!) 98% of the time, they’ll be fine. If you coddle and overprotect - 98% of the time, your kid will be a cry-baby.

Tag teaches kids some very important social lessons:

1. Sometimes, it’s good to be the “It.” You get to chase people, stalk your prey, choose to run or be lazy and not run. Looking at this game through the eyes of an adult, I can see now that it is so much better to be the “It.” The “It” has all the control. Everyone fears the “It”. The only time it’s actually bad to be the “It” is if you happen to be a cry-baby. Cry-babies don’t make good “Its”. It is hard to fear some wussy kid who is crying because he sucks at Tag.

2. Spontaneously declaring “Base!” on any random object is a great way to get a much-needed reprieve from all the chaos. In fact, I wish I’d yell “base” sometimes in real life. It’s a lesson in the importance of taking a break and setting your boundaries.

3. Tag is not always fair. If you get a tag-back, it seems completely unjust, but that’s just how it goes. As an adult, we receive tag-backs all the time: just when you fix one thing, something else breaks. Or as soon as you finish a project, you get another one dumped in your lap. We create some tag-backs too - we get a paycheck in our hand and out it goes. We pass the buck, shift the blame - unfair, but it happens. We learn to deal with it.

4. The newer renditions of Tag were the games of Freeze-Tag and TV-Tag. In Freeze-Tag, you had to freeze when you got tagged until another player unfreezes you - a good lesson in teamwork and helping a person in need. It also teaches you about Karma - if you’ve recently pissed off the other kids, you’ll remain frozen for all eternity. In TV-Tag, you had to say the name of a TV show as soon as you were tagged. If you hesitated, got tongue tied, or repeated someone else’s answer - you’d be out of the game. (I ruled at TV-tag. And we didn’t even have cable.) This is a great lesson in multi-tasking: run and think. Plan ahead and have several answers ready. Be obscure.

The important social lessons of games like Tag far outweigh the danger of some bonked heads or skinned knees.

I don’t know of any adult who says “My childhood years were difficult - filled with fear and pent-up rage. I felt like a monster, a freak of nature because of that tiny scar on my elbow from playing TAG. (sobbing) DON’T LOOK AT ME - I’m hideous.”

You know what I remember from playing childhood games? That dodge-ball was really just a legal way for gym teachers to exact revenge, that playing hide and seek in the backyard at night was great fun but it made me have to pee, and that it’ not worth crying about getting hurt if it means missing out on a moment’s fun. Parents need to teach their kids that last one.

Live a little. Get hurt. Be the “It”.

Summer is nearing its sweltering climax and it is getting HOT out here! We are in the middle of a heat wave and I am loving it because it’s the “dry heat” we east-coasters hear so much about. It’s lovely.

Here’s what I don’t love: the fact that we live across the street from the pool.

The only time that the pool isn’t a salty stew of children is in the middle of the day when the kids are at camp and it’s 107 degrees. When it finally cools down to a chilly 90 degrees in the afternoon, all the kids are home and the parents have sent them to the pool, as if camp didn’t wear them out enough.

Having recently quit my job, I have been home during kiddie pool-time every day. I haven’t been this close to screaming profanities out of my window since my college days when everyone was doing it. (The “Soylent Green” skit was new on SNL. You can just imagine how much sleep could be had at the dorm.)

I have decided that when the day comes that I just plain lose it (this will be soon), my defense for any subsequent illegal actions will set a precedent. I will call it the “Marco Polo Defense”, and I think that it will stand up in a court of law.

It’s like the insanity defense. Because listening to 15-30 minutes of little grating voices calling “Marco!” followed by a chorus of other equally grating voices replying “POLO!“does make a person insane. You don’t think so? Your kids play this game and you don’t see a problem? Perhaps you played it yourself as a child?

Try this: Record your children, or yourself, playing Marco Polo for 30 minutes. Then digitally alter the voices so that they sound like other peoples’ children. Play it back while you are trying to relax or work or sleep or eat or exist. You will want to cause someone or something harm in a very painful way in about 11.67 minutes. Guaranteed.

You should wait to do this experiment until after I’ve had my day in court because by then, the Marco Polo Defense will be on the books and we both can go on the Today Show and talk about how a society of hands-off parenting has caused us to become such monsters.

Whatever happened to the other fun pool games like hand-stand contests, “guess-what-I’m-saying-underwater”, and the ever-popular “how-long-can-you-hold-your-breath” game? You know, the quiet games that mostly took place beneath the surface of the water? I see these kids at the pool and their games don’t seem to have much to them except screaming and splashing. We had synchronized swimming, races, underwater toy retrievals, and who could create the most complex series of flips and handstands: Games of skill and endurance. We may have had a few screams and splashes but that’s ALL these kids have do the pool these days.

And that’s another thing - why on earth are children allowed to scream so much? This little girl stood outside my window the other day and SCREAMED for her friend “ASHLEY!!!!” for seriously 10 minutes. What parent lets their little girl do this? ASHLEY!!!! was only 5 houses down, playing with some other little girls.

Maybe my memory is inaccurate, but I don’t recall being permitted to scream like that as a child. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was a quiet and reserved and polite little girl who played quietly with her sisters and friends and made up intricate games that required creativity and intelligence. These were some of our favorite outdoor games:

- Spanish immigrant family living in a tenement. (We listened to the Spanish radio station for authenticity.) In this game, we pretty much utilized every babydoll we could find in the house, and snipers were a daily nuisance. There were many casualties. (We were dark and dramatic children.)

- Native American family who had to continually offer food to the volcano god (the compost pile) to ensure the safety of our village. This game was played in the fall when our dad’s garden had to be harvested and composted. It helped him out. (See? We were creative and helpful children!) I would always get cold and bored and end the game early by pretending to sacrifice myself to the god. (no, I didn’t jump in - it was pretend. Yuck.)

- A gang of scrappy homeless children in London who had to break into rich peoples’ houses (our house) to steal food. I played the rich girl who befriended the tough street urchins (my sisters and friends.)

- French orphans who were discovered in a rainstorm (the sprinkler) and were taken in by kindly nuns (mom and grandma) to live in their convent. Of course, we had to sneak out to see boys.

- And our all-time favorite game in summer - when the camper was set-up to be cleaned before or after a camping trip: Southern family who ran a diner out of their trailer. That was the best one because we could do a southern accent like we were born and raised in Alabama or something. (our dad is from Virginia. It’s in our blood.)

(People ask me why I don’t have a New York accent. I don’t think I used my own accent much growing up - notice the ethnicities above. If we couldn’t use a different accent, it wasn’t a fun game. Even my prank phone calls were in French or an Asian gibberish.)

Psht! Marco Polo! You could teach a chicken to play Marco Polo (maybe not the swimming part.) I don’t think kids today even know what a sniper is - but they may soon find out if this marco polo shit doesn’t stop.

Have I mentioned that Orange County, California is the breeding capital of the Caucasian race? It is.

Emil and I are not going to have children. People who don’t know us very well think we will change our minds because…well I don’t know WHY exactly. People who DO know us understand perfectly…no one who REALLY knows us wants US to have children. Babies and I generally don’t like each other, and children and Emil don’t get along at all. (Neither shares well.) That’s just the way it is.

We had no idea when we toured our apartment complex with “Dallas”, the rental agent, that this pristine, quiet community was merely a front for one giant child care center specializing in 10-12-year-old boys who like to skateboard and play kick-ball. I guess their caretakers aren’t getting paid enough to mind that these boys play in the alleys where the garages are (kind of dangerous) instead of the beautiful huge park that adjoins our property. Nor do they care that the boys are LOUD. I am starting to wonder if there are adults in charge of them at all.

If these boys do have parents, our theory is that all the parents got together and decided that 8am on Sunday would be the universally scheduled nookie time and so they send their kids out to play very loudly in the alley. Since Emil and I don’t pencil in such activity, we have been rudely awakened every Sunday by the sounds of skateboards and shouting pre-teens. (Now, now! Don’t even go there - the kids ARE worse because we have to listen to them for more than 5 minutes.)

Every weekday, the complex is so peaceful and relaxing. You can hear hummingbirds flying about, birds chirping, bunnies foraging, lizards…being lizards. 2:30pm hits and it’s all kids. Screaming, playing, yelling, splashing in the pool, SHAKING MY TREE, kicking balls into my garage door, blaming each other when I go out to yell at them for kicking balls into my garage door. Then darkness falls and the 3 year olds start their bathtime/bedtime tantrums while mothers call for their pre-teens to come inside it’s getting dark and did you do your homework.

This is not what I signed up for. I’m not having kids, so I should be able to avoid the tantrums and the homework-nagging! It’s almost worse when it’s not your kids because you can’t yell at them they way you think they should be yelled at. I’m sorry but if “Miles” gave me lip when I wanted him to come inside at 8pm, he’d be inside at 8:00:03 with one arm longer than the other. (still want me to change my mind about kids?) There are reasons I chose pets over children - crate-training dogs is legal and cats use a litterbox starting at 4 weeks old.

I feel really bad for Emil, whose “living on the west coast/working on the east coast” schedule is such that that he’s awake and on the phone at 6am, but done working at 3pm - just in time for the kids to get home. This means that after a day of power conference calls, he can’t relax at the pool because of the screaming, splashing children, he can’t decompress his brain in front of the TV because the kids are yelling at each other right outside the window, and thus he is in danger of becoming one of those creepy dudes who is drinking beer at the dive bar by the beach every afternoon.

Normally, I try to be a polite neighbor who reminds her husband that revving the car engine for no real reason is rude - but after many weeks of enduring the antics of their unsupervised offspring, my new motto is…well it basically tells the neighbors what to do using some swear words, let’s just put it that way. And they don’t need to schedule some time for it either - just whenever and often.

With the astounding child to adult ratio of our area, the fact that we cannot acquire food after 9pm, and that I might have a better chance of getting crack delivered to my apartment than pizza - we have some thinking to do about where to buy a house within the year. newportkeri might change to losangeleskeri or hollywoodhillskeri or god-willing, venicekeri. We’ll see…