Act Three/Scene Four of A Complex Apology: Just Before the Bad News Hits
SCENE FOUR: The kids, of course, soaked it all up, little realizing how lucky they were, how unique their neighborhood was. Of course you get to ski and toboggan in the winter. Of course all your friends want to come to your house after school. Of course your mom makes everybody hot chocolate and cookies. Of course you can make money shoveling walks and mowing lawns. So they tackled ice skating. There’s Como Lake at the end of the block. Why isn’t it shoveled and made into a rink? Didn’t there used to be an oval with a warming house that sent speed skaters to the Olympics? As a group, the kids drew up a petition asking the City to once again get ice skating back on Como Lake, and so it came to be.
By the time they were in high school, a whole set of loosely organized summer activities had also evolved. Another little used garage on the block became an activities center with a nok-hockey board, a foosball table, and outside a basketball court and volleyball net. Summertime the yard was a croquet court that never came down. The eldest Darylmple boy invented a game called “Guerilla” (which the younger kids thought was spelled G-O-R-I-L-L-A), a sophisticated game of hide-and-go-seek. One person is it. The others go hide – using half the neighborhood. Each hider has six bullets for ammo. Point your finger and say “Bang!” once, and the seeker has to stop in his/her tracks and count to 25. Use all your ammo and the seeker has to count to 150. If you wanted to find a new hiding place, you might use all your ammo at once; if you just wanted to get a head-start on racing away, you might just use 1 bullet and save your ammo.
A kid from the next block over taught everyone how to play “Rip Ball” off the garage roof. Using the volleyball, the idea is to keep the ball coming off the front of the roof, next in turn batting it up again, until someone misses and gains a strike. Five strikes and you’re out. The experts could leap high and rip the ball off the roof requiring the next in turn to have to make a volleyball-like save to get it back on the roof. Another kid invented a neighborhood version of Frisbee golf, using the Bigelow’s big oak tree, the stop sign at the corner, the park bench, etc., as the holes which your Frisbee had to hit. Occasionally even a “half-ball” game would spring-up in the alley. Como Pool was only a short bike ride away.
The beauty of it was that all the kids were outdoors playing, older kids mixed with younger kids, and so it came that the kids still in child care complained bitterly that they didn’t want to go to child care anymore and instead just wanted to have fun in the neighborhood. Upon learning this, Joy suggested to those parents that if they left a little lunch money, she’d make sure their kid got lunch, assign the most responsible teenagers to make sure the kids stayed safe, and pay the older ones. Jobs for kids and savings for parents. What a ‘Win-Win,” soon to be an Americorps Program. Maybe your kid will be the next Olympic champion speed skater, or get a volleyball scholarship to Santa Cruz State, or be the next great drummer in a rock & roll band. (A neighborhood band had formed using the Darymple’s grandmother apartment for jam sessions.)
Tomorrow: Act Four