Playground space was always at a premium in my younger days. The private school I went to was not one of those affluent, serene, tie and blazer scenes laid out over a sweeping campus grounds. Ours was more so a small, grungy, religious collective school, set around an open, crumbling ash-felt rectangle. A high, cyclone fence separated the couple of less-than-regulation size basketball courts on one side from a nondescript square on the other that would be used for outdoor school assemblies and epic cricket matches. At the bottom of this, was a raised square, which was laid with tan-bark and comparable in size to a 7 spot carpark. Sitting in the middle of this was a wooden jungle gym, complete with a swing, two slides, monkey bars and a swinging, wood slat bridge.
For the several years prior to adolescence, whilst we were not senior enough to fight off our elders for the use of the basketball courts, this was the recess area we made ours. And there was just one game we played on it, at both morning and afternoon recess, everyday – King.
I'm not sure the origins of King, but I presume it was one of those inherited type rituals, passed down from generation to generation of conquest searching boys. My old school had plenty of such passed down rites of passage.
The rules of King were actually quite simple. One lad would stand mounted upon the jungle gym, armed with a tennis ball, whilst the rest of the thirty or so kids in our class, would swarm around on the tan-bark. The fellow up above was called 'King' and his role was to throw the tennis ball at the moving targets below. If, before the ball bounced, he made contact with any of them or, if in the course of trying to avoid the ball one of them stepped off the raised square, then they were 'out' and had to stand out for the rest of the game. The ball would continuously be tossed backup to him for re-firing and once the minions had been whittled down to just one, that last remaining boy would be declared the winner and 'King'. He would then ascend up to the raised platform of the jungle-gym and the game would begin all over again, with this new boy the one doing the throwing.
I dreamed about King the other day. It was quite odd, for I hadn't remembered or thought about it for decades. It just popped into my subconscious and played out in that nocturnal film that passes the sleeping hours. Why? There must be a reason. What was the dream trying to tell me?
There's alot one could take out of the game itself. A lot one could take from what it all means. The game is so densely laden with metaphor and psychological inferences. There was the violent expression of the small boys trying to cause pounding injury with every throw. The mass hysteria of such a large group scrambling for escape. There's the process each King went through in selecting who to aim for. The falling sensation one always experiences when running on the loose tan-bark underfoot. The strong message of being so young and contained to the confines of that small square. Or even just the way of how it perfectly represents the nature of success as simply being a fruit borne by survival.
There's alot there. But I don't think this is what brought about the dream.
I think its all got to do with 'chasing' and 'love'.
See, in the game of King, everybody is being chased. Chased by the throwing arm of the King. He is the only one not being chased. Once any of the kids below were caught, they were out – they had to remove them-self to the sidelines – until the end. And this end only came about when there was one boy left. One boy who had managed to escape the chasing. And what was his reward – his prize for not getting caught? He got to be the one doing all the chasing.
It seems to me, by the way my days have flowed so far, that relationships end up working out this way. There are those that are never caught – those that avoid the chase – and their 'reward' is that they are left to do the chasing themselves. This way, they feel they are in control. they are getting to choose who they share their destiny with. They get to stand beside the monkeys bars, or run across that unstable bridge and select and take aim and chase away.
However, there's one major difference between The Game and the game of King. You see, there was always an end to our old playground game. Most days, we'd be able to cram in several rounds over the course of a total of 45 minutes recess time. It not only finished relatively quickly, but you could watch it happen. You could watch the numbers of survivors decrease and know when the end was nigh. But it's not so much the same with chasing a relationship. Not at all. One could realistically believe that they could end up chasing until death and live to regret never getting caught. We've all been there. In the depth of those Blues. You're probably right there right now.
So, I guess my dream was all about the question:
When is my 'reward' gonna end? When do I get to stop chasing?
I'm exhausted and there's only so much longer I can keep aiming this damn tennis ball.....
