The games people play

When you’re a little kid, you can lose yourself in your own reality do it with as many other people as you can convince to join you just about anytime you want, anywhere you want absolutely for free.

I remember playing for hours with my buddy Ron across the street. We played cops and robbers and we played cowboys and Indians. We’d watch “The Big Valley,” with Lee Majors, Linda Evans, and Barbara Stanwick riding their horses around 1870’s California and then we’d head outside and play cowboys and Indians. Our bikes doubled as horses. Being in Phoenix, there was plenty of desert for pretending in.

Then a new kid moved into our neighborhood. Juaquin was may same age, Ron was like a year and a half younger. Juaquin was half Maracoipa Indian. So we didn’t play cowboys and Indians so much. He’d get sick and tired of always having to be the Indian. It wasn’t any kind of political correctness, it was just friends being sensitive to our pal.

Of course then we’d play CHiPs (after another TV show, about the California Highway Patrol). When we played CHiPs Juaquin always got to play Erick Estrada’s character Frank “Ponch” Poncherello, the cool Hispanic motorcycle cop. Ron and I had to take turns playing his partner Jon Baker, the nerdy white guy. It’s okay, Jon could still jump ramps and wipe-out on his bike, even if he couldn’t get the babes. And after all, we were only seven years old. We didn’t care about being babe magnets, we cared about stopping bad guys.

It seems like no matter who the boys are or who their parents are or whether or not they have any toy guns, boys play guns. In fact, that was what we called it. “Guns.” Just “guns.” Eventually we didn’t call it “cowboys and Indians” or “CHiPs” or “Cops & Robbers,” or even “War” or “Army.” We just called it “Guns.”

Both Ron & my Dads had been in the Marine Corps. Mine was fortunate to be stationed on an aircraft carrier in Cuba during Korea. Ron’s was in Vietnam. Of course we had no clue about what he’d been through or what happened there. But somehow we both knew that killing and dying were bad. Kids know that. That’s why we always had the same argument-

“Bang! You’re dead!”

“Am NOT, you missed me!”

“Did not, I got you! You have to die sometime, you have to let me hit you”

“Did too! You can’t always hit me, people miss in real life, you know! Besides, I died last time, it’s YOUR turn to get shot.”

“Why do I always have to die?!”

So eventually we decided to take prisoners. The really scary part was the brainwashing. I know that in first through third grade or so we had no idea what that meant. Maybe we picked it up from some war movie or overheard our parents talking about re-education camps in Vietnam or about that “Manchurian Candidate” movie. All I knew was if there were more than two guys playing and someone was taken prisoner we’d say we “taught him a lesson” and basically that meant that the player switched sides.

I’m not hypersensitive or paranoid about all this. Boys will be boys. They all play war. Ban all toy guns and they’ll use their fingers or make a rock or stick into a gun. It’s not societal, it’s natural. And I guess I’d rather they PRETEND to shoot Nazis or Communists or bank robbers than light barns on fire or spray paint small animals for real.

The only time my bleeding heart Liberalism bothered me was once when I was watching my girls play among dozens of kids on the Louis & Clark playground in the Mall in Sioux City. A little boy had a brand new plastic toy Uzi machine gun. It wasn’t just that he was playing guns when everyone else was just climbing and tumbling and giggling. Part of it was that he was the only kid with a toy. Everyone else was playing on the equipment, so that was just sort of impolite. The other thing was probably jus that I’m a teacher and ever since the Columbine shootings, teachers are unnerved when they see one little kid pretending to shoot dozens of other kids. It was surreal. But I kept it to myself and didn’t reprimand the little guy or chastise his mom in an indignant manor or anything. I just sat there and dealt with my own chills.

Even girls have some aggressive pretending times. Sticks are all swords, not just magic wands.

“So how’d your day go?”

“So and so hit me.”

“WHAT???” trying not to fly off the handle. “What was going on? Did you say something to make them angry? Did you take a toy they were playing with? Did they just up and hit you out of the blue?”

“No, we were playing Karate and she got the first point.”