Libby loved playing the game Life.
After school or in the summer, she would come over to my house and we’d lay out
the game board in my living room. The official rules never did suit Libby – she
wanted more options, more control - so early on she changed them. Sometimes I
think Libby almost viewed the game as a distant cousin of the Ouija board. For
her it was just another portal into the future, whatever happed to her tiny car
as it moved from one space on the board to the next was an indication of what
she could expect in her own life. Therefore, her rules were designed to always
ensure that she got what she so desperately wanted. Getting married became an
option. If you didn’t want to stop, you could keep going right passed the
chapel. However, if you did get married you had to announce where you were
spending your honeymoon. Libby, a proud Italian-American, almost always went to
Italy .
Libby wanted lots of children, and since she never had enough when she played
by the real rules, she designed various other ways to pick up kids along the
way – I wish I still remembered what they were. Each kid, of course needed a
name, and you weren’t allowed to spin unless you gave them one. It didn’t
matter what the board dictated, you weren’t suck with a girl if you really
wanted a boy, which was good since Libby always wanted a car full of boys with
one girl – Grace. I have no memory of what we named any of the other kids that
came our way, but Libby always named her girl Grace. If she had a daughter
someday, that’s what she was going to name her. And she was going to be a doctor. She wanted
to be a doctor as much as I wanted to play basketball, and if the spinner
didn’t land on the proper number early on so that she could earn her doctor
degree, she found ways to change her profession too. Libby had her entire life mapped out, she
only needed the game to confirm that it would unfold according to plan. At the
end of each game, which she generally won – it’s kind of hard to beat someone
who keeps changing the rules according to their whims – she was generally
satisfied. Life was good and with a car full of kids and a bank full of money
it was hard not to be happy. The problem was the game didn’t have any spaces
marked, “You died an unfair death and are now eliminated from the game.” But then again, even if the game did include
such a space, Libby would have found a way around it. Death in the game would
have been a choice, and she would have opted out of it – most of us would. But
when the car she was sitting in careened out of control and crashed into a
guard rail there was no way out. In the
game of Life, you can sit in the driver’s seat of your own car, Libby never
even got her license. The last car she ever sat in was her brother’s. And at
twenty-four, she had not been married nor did ever have the opportunity to have
a little girl named Grace.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Pirate Island
My son
loves pirates. He is fascinated by them and believes that they have buried treasure up and down the entire Long Island coast. There is a beach in Peconic
that my family loves to visit. It sits
right on the creek and it is perfect for swimming and kayaking. Even though it is more accurately a peninsula,
my son has decided that the beach on the other side of the creek is an
island. Our first visit there this
summer, he insisted on visiting the “island,” which he dubbed Pirate Island, so
that he could search for treasure, convinced that pirates had buried it somewhere
in the sand. My mother, not wanting to
disappoint him, had taken a few pennies and wrapped them in aluminum foil, torn
from our lunches. My son and I crossed
the creek in kayak, carrying a shovel with us, and while my parents distracted
him, looking for treasure in one direction, I disappeared the opposite way, dug
three holes and deposited the treasure.
Covering each cache with driftwood or dried reeds shaped in the letter X,
I set off to find my son and redirect his attention. Finding the Xs in the sand, he was excited.
Uncovering the treasure he was ecstatic.
Later that
same week, my mother stopped into a craft store in search of wooden treasure
boxes. Finding three tiny ones, she
purchased them for my son’s next adventure.
When we next headed off to Pirate Island, my dad filled the boxes with
pennies and again I buried them while my son searched elsewhere for the
telltale Xs that would indicate a pirate’s presence.
“He’s got
to know that you’re the one hiding them,” my dad insisted as my son
enthusiastically uncovered the treasure and counted the coins. But if he knew,
he showed no indication or disappointment that it wasn’t the work of real
pirates.
While my son loves the concept of
looking for buried treasure, he is not very good at actually spotting the Xs that
have grown bigger over the course of the summer. Dad usually walks ahead and when he spies the
X he stands stiffly, leaning over the mark waiting for my son to see him. If the treasure is buried too deeply, my son
hands off the shovel to someone else. I learned that lesson once after digging
too deeply – nearly to the water level - thinking it would somehow enhance the
anticipation and excitement. I was
dreadfully mistaken.
As the summer
progressed, we played the game repeatedly and each time my son was thrilled to add
several pennies to the jar in which he was saving up to buy some more Legos. However, on his second to last excursion, he expressed
some regret that the pirates were only burying pennies instead of gold doubloons. So on our last outing, hoping to compensate
for not possessing any real doubloons, my father ensured that instead of pennies
my son would find dollar bills. This time my
little pirate was delighted with his finds because now he finally had enough
money for a trip to the toy store to buy his beloved Legos.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)