Reflective essay on 'games'

I’m not a big game player, but there was something about Monopoly, while growing up, that seemed like a ‘grown-up’ game. It was, to a certain extent, a serious game, when I was in my late teens/early 20s, and footloose and fancy free. It required commitment. If you started in the evening with your buddies, you were going to be in it for the long haul. There was something wonderful about being a cash-poor student in reality, and being able to take in hundreds of dollars with a single move, that contributed an element of vicarious fantasy. Strategy was a bit iffy. I think that the general consensus was that you bought everything you landed on, until you ran out of capital, and until you passed ‘go’ again. That precluded feeling guilty if you didn’t buy a property the first chance you had, and felt naïve later that you didn’t. The late-night games usually dragged on so long that you got sleep-deprived enough, that you just didn’t care what happened anymore. I am even more enamored today with the insanely-democratic concept of the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. You could just have that puppy sitting there for when you needed it, and if you were trying to avoid moving towards some rather threatening hotels, you didn’t even have to use it. Being incarcerated produced no potential of physical assault or bad odors, and you didn’t have to use it if you didn’t want to, which felt wonderfully indulgent. These days you have to be related to a high-ranking official, or very rich, or be a significant campaign donor, to be able to pull off that kind of move.
In grade school, I liked ‘4-Square’. I was not one of the athletic clique, all through school. I didn’t really hit my stride until my early 20’s, when I started taking martial arts, and dance classes, and finally started to attain some sort of physical grace. Sports in grade school was a little taste of ‘the lord of the flies’ for me. I wore coke-bottle glasses, and was above-average geeky. Good at spelling, sucky at baseball. I was in Pee-Wee baseball, and was usually a right-fielder, where, I have no doubt, it was felt I would do the least damage to the team’s total score. Depth perception was a problem, as were fly balls. Basketball was even more tortuous. Dribbling, nyet. Hitting the basketball rim, without shot completion, was a major accomplishment. On the playground, Tetherball was a soul-crusher. Watching somebody making well-timed jumps, snapping that ball around-and-around, just above my reach, would have been enough to send me to the existentialist literature, but the library at Adams Elementary School didn’t carry books by Hubert Selby, Jr. 4-Square I could handle. It was physical, but not too physical. The distances were close. The ball itself was lovingly ‘giving’ in its relative firmness. When somebody ‘above’ you was ‘taken out’, you got to advance a square. I was on a fairly equal physical parity with the female students of my class. No bloody noses from merciless targeting such as occurred in its nihilistic gladiatorial cousin, Dodgeball.