Pirates in the Woods
International Journal Of Play, February 2018
When I was a couple months shy of seven my family moved from West Virginia to Springfield, Massachusetts where I was teased mercilessly because of the way I talked. 'Come on Ricky…count for us.' So I would begin… wahn, tew, thray, fawr, fahve…and these kids, who would soon become my best friends, would roll on the ground laughing and holding their bellies and then we'd all run around in the woods and pretend we were fighting bad guys; pirates one day, Nazis the next. That winter, when my accent became more like theirs, we walked up the road to the frozen pond where I inched around on the ice as if I were an old man with a broken hip while my Yankee friends skimmed across the surface, gliding and giggling. I so wanted to be like them, I so wanted to fly. Even now pushing sixty years later, I remember lying in my bed that night with a dreamy glorious feeling of imagining the glide, feeling the breeze, seeing myself flying along with my friends. And the very next day I could skate just as they were and how amazed I was that what I had seen myself doing the night before had come true. No lessons. No coaching. Just my seven-year old imagination.
That next summer we played baseball – all day, every day, morning until dark. Mothers stood on their steps and called out down the street, 'Tommy, Sparky, Dennis, Stephen …' and Tommy and Sparky and Dennis and Stephen … yelled back, 'Five more minutes ma' and we kept playing until the moon rose.
Our field was in front of my house at the junction of two dead end roads. The left field foul line was Woodcrest. The right field foul line was South Branch where, ten feet beyond, the woods (and pirates) seemed to take great pleasure at stealing our tattered baseballs. The surface of our ballpark was cracked asphalt not dirt and grass. To anyone else the field was a mess. But not to us. To us it was perfect. Fenway Park perfect.
My memory fades but on a good day we had, maybe, ten kids, quite a few short of the nine on a side 'real' baseball called for. So, given the limits of our terrain and the short numbers of players we made up our own rules. Before you came to bat you had to say what direction you hoped to hit the ball and if you didn't hit it there you were, by agreement, called out.
Centerfield was off limits because Mr. Weiner wouldn't give our ball back if we hit into his yard. A foul ball to the right side was always an out because of those damned thieving pirates lurking in the woods. We did away with unnecessary positions: sometimes a first baseman, sometimes an outfielder or two, sometimes one side or the other of the infield, and always the catcher, but every kid got to play every inning and try every position. We invented imaginary men who could occupy a base. We all aped our favorite players. One day I was Ted Williams grinding my hands against the bat handle before exploding a sweet-violent swing. Another day I was Al Kaline who had no such quirk. Most kids tried to switch hit. Once in a while Stephen or Tommy, the two craziest among us, would slide into third base and scream as the gravel and tar ripped through their jeans and sliced their skin. God it was fun.
Our games were blood sport. Scores were kept. Winning teams made fun of the losers, really rubbing their noses in the misery. 'You stink. You'll always stink. My little sister is better than you are.' And then after strutting and preening, teams broke up, sides were chosen again and a new game was played; over and over, maybe six or eight or ten times a day. By nightfall everyone had won some games, everyone had lost some games. The uncoordinated kids were always chosen last but played every inning and didn't always lose. The good players, the ones who could really smack the ball, were always chosen first but didn't always win. We argued constantly, loud yelling and screaming over who was safe, who was out, what was a strike, what was a ball and then we'd figure it all out, negotiating as if these were international peace talks. No parents, no coaches. No trophies. Small d democracy writ even smaller.
A couple of summers later the local chapter of the Lions Club put together some kid-league baseball teams and we all got t shirts and hats. (Full uniforms would come when we were ten.) Some of us were on Cornell and some of us were on Columbia. I still don't know why those names were chosen. We were kids whose dads sold things and repaired things and only a few had ever seen the inside of a college (weirdly my dad had gotten a Masters degree at Columbia and I had to play for Cornell). And suddenly we had organized practices and "real" games a couple times a week. We had fields with grass and dirt and fences and benches and Mr. Weiner's house wasn't in the middle of centerfield. We had father-coaches who told us the positions we would play, where we would bat in the lineup, how we should throw, how we should swing. I couldn't pretend I was Ted Williams anymore. We had umpires who decided things for us. We stopped yelling at each other, we stopped negotiating. Lousy kids played very little. Good kids played every inning of every game. Mothers kept line scores and batting averages were figured and recorded until year's end when a most valuable player trophy was awarded, usually to the coach's son.
Kids who played in the kid-league began to opt out of our street games. 'Practice tonight. Coach said I can't play.' Kids who weren't very good at baseball found reasons to opt out of both. 'I don't feel good ma.' And each year the number of us who kept playing baseball at any level grew smaller and smaller so that in high school a couple of us played and in college I was the only one left.
Most of us made it through adolescence in one piece and eventually we all moved away. Once in a while, I drive though the old neighborhood, right through the middle of our old ball field at the junction of South Branch and Woodcrest and I've never once seen a kid in the street playing, never once seen a kid chasing a pirate in the woods.
Almost thirty years ago, for three summers, I taught a graduate psychology class called 'Confusion, Chaos and Creativity.' (It was an amalgam of some ideas from chaos theory, my ideas about the importance and power of confusion, and how both can help to understand creativity.) One day we brought a dozen kids, around eight or ten years old, to a magnificent new playscape in my suburban town. It must have cost a bajillion dollars and the thing was beautiful; chutes and ladders and monkey bars and cargo nets and god knows what else. The kids got out of the cars and ran screaming for the playscape where they used the equipment as the designer intended it to be used; up the ladder, down the chute, hand over hand across the monkey bars … But before I could even take a note, they all broke the rules and it was up the chute, and down the ladder, and walking on the frame above the monkey bars. And then in a matter of minutes they grew bored until someone shouted, 'Hey let's go over there.' And they all ran as fast as they could to an open field that had absolutely nothing in it. No chute, no ladder, no balls, no toys … nothing. And they stayed there for the next hour making up games, arguing over rules, trying out the new game, finding the game 'stupid,' dissolving in laughter and giggles, and rearranging a new set of rules for a new game and more dissolving and more laughter until finally, as I recall, they hit on something that, more or less, pleased everyone.
These kids were my friends and me (what seems like) a million years ago. But they were also Kepler and Einstein and Heisenberg and Bohr. They were Michael Jordan. They were Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell. They were Fredrick Douglass and Harriett Tubman. They were Picasso. They were any person who ever asked a question in the service of creativity. They were any person who ever questioned an accepted rule. They were players.
Play isn't just a thing we do. Play isn't a diversion from real life. Play isn't preparation for something to come. In this universe of chance, change, motion and connection where a ripple here yields a ripple there and nothing stays forever still, play becomes fundamental to life because without play a system can neither be born nor continue to exist.