Playground

I’ve only ever been proposed to twice. Once was from my husband, though frankly, that was more of a startling conversation than a proposal. 

The only actual, “Will you marry me, Mary Beth?” moment of my life happened in a wildly romantic moment on the South Hamlin Elementary School playground when I was eight and so was Danny. We were on the swings, I was sitting, he was standing up and pumping so hard that we flew up and back almost as high as the fifteen foot bar from which we were suspended. He and I had been playing happily together for days. I answered yes, I really wanted to marry him but couldn’t because he was Catholic and thus, sadly, going to hell. But if he ever got “born again” to let me know and I was in. By the time I figured all this out (in my 20’s) he was in the FBI. 

But the thing I really want to talk about here is not Danny but that playground. I went to the same rural school from kindergarten through eighth grade; I played on that playground nearly every day.

I was raised in an fundamentalist Christian church; the kind where there were actual debates about whether people who smoked cigarettes could go to heaven. Dancing, movies, and Ouija boards were stepping stones to the devil. An intense childhood, to be sure. 

For me the playground was a salvation/damnation neutral area. It was where I could run, climb, screech, act, be a leader or be a follower as a slowly intuited for myself what kids were awesome and which ones not so much. It’s where I learned most of what I know about how to live among humans who are not worried about The Rapture. 

We learned how to move; we girls were jump roping dervishes. One to three girls would run in and keep jumping as we all sing-sang, “Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack, all dressed in black black black, with silver buttons buttons buttons, all down her back back back…” 

Some of us were better than others but we all were learning balance, cadence, patience, and the breathlessness of sheer joy. I still remember my mom asking me to try to jump rope without ripping out the hems of my dresses. The thing to understand is that back then we wore saddle shoes or Mary Janes that generally had sharp little corners on the heels; thus all hems were vulnerable to high-kicking hem-snagging. In jump-rope season our dresses dragged. We didn’t care. Exertion and precision were more fun than being cute to someone else. Some of us would become feminists. There’s a connection there. 

Occasionally playground life was pretty intense. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis this way: a bunch of us were hanging out on swings, kicking our feet a little, some of us were leaning against the steel support poles. All of us were scared. All of us were sharing what we knew which was very little. We were trying to understand if and when we were going to be killed by an atom bomb. Yes, that was the conversation among a half dozen kids who were not yet ten-years-old. At home I was told not to worry because God always held us in His (sic) hand. On the playground we could worry out loud and together. 

There was a particular girl in my class who was bright, hardworking, and kind but who also had some kind of muscle tone issue; she was a nice kid who was slightly different than the rest of us. The issue for me was that she esteemed me too much. I don’t know why. Probably because I was the kid who lived with a boatload of “you must be nice to everyone the way Jesus was nice to everyone” inside me. She intuited my inner scruples so she gravitated towards me. I was not the only kid who was nice to her; none of my classmates were jerks. Yet somehow nearly every morning that girl would ask, “Can I play with you today?” For nine years I’d answer that I was going to play with a lot of the kids so she could play with all of us, too. And then I’d make that happen.

I think that I became the leader that I often am today because the only way to not play with her one-on-one was to invent things for a bunch of girls to play at once. Which led to the year I brilliantly (?) suggested we start our own club which I named the “Dumb Nuts”. (Writers have to start somewhere?). We made name tags and we had meetings (what did we discuss?) on the monkey bars. 

Decades later I would go to seminary and eventually create and lead groups in and outside of church congregations. I’m telling you now; most of that was modeled on the Dumb Nuts on the monkey bars. Name your committee, make some name tags, get together regularly, talk about what happened recently, what’s coming up, see if anyone has any hopes or goals. Accomplish a little but not much. 

South Hamlin’s midcentury playground was rife with unsafe equipment. The slide was easy to tumble off sideways. The monkey bars were twelve feet high and looked like the steel skeleton of an igloo; it was easy to fall from an upper bars, hitting other bars on one’s way down. The merry-go-round sometimes caught and dragged kids. I witnessed all of the above accidents. Most of us learned what the pitfalls were and were careful. 

The one fine October day one of those accidents found me. I was sitting on a teeter-totter chatting with Ruth Ann. Eddie walked by, grabbed her up-in-the-air end and slammed it down just to tease her. I rocketed upwards; there was no place to hang on through the physics lesson that was me. I returned to earth via the steel bar fulcrum. 

I spent all that afternoon and many more hours over many years in dentist chairs dealing with the damage. I endured more medical trauma and Novocain injections than most kids have to deal with. In my family I was still regarded as the non-serious youngest, at church I was my parents’ cute kid, but in the dentist chair I was me. I found within myself the mettle to mostly stop crying, shut my eyes, and endure. Enduring is a very hard skill.

South Hamlin’s playground also had five horizontal steel bar of increasing heights. By first and second grade we could straddle the lowest bar which was about three feet off the ground. With one knee bent and the other leg locked behind, we’d plunge forward, downwards, and then, if all went as planned, back up to sitting. Really cool girls could do this several times in a row. I could do two.

 As we became taller and stronger we moved up the bars. I tried for weeks to be able to clasp the bar that was about shoulder height, then kick up and forward to swing my whole body over. The first time I actually did this my over-the-top glee was exactly the same as the first time I was published. 

By sixth grade I was strong enough to hang from the tallest bar to pull myself from a stationary hang into a chin-up. I could barely do this twice but I remember the day an eighth grade boy watched me and said I was good. I was stunned, I hasn’t known anyone was watching. Some random older man (I was ten, he was maybe twelve?) told me I was strong so I believed him. A lot of adults were telling us all who to be and how to behave, yet another kid telling me I was strong was powerful.

For all the regular sane and insane reasons, girls and boys didn’t often play together. This began to change as we became 7^th and 8^th graders interested in actual sports. Everything I know to this day about basketball (and I don’t know much) came from playing it on the macadam court at the back of our sandy playground. I remember running like crazy, yelling to teammates, sometimes aiming and shooting at the basket. There were kids who could actually make a basket, not me, but I loved the sheer sweaty fun of it anyway. 

We also played volleyball with boys and I’m confessing right here that yes, I punched Bobby in the nose the day I thought he was cheating. Teachers were amazed at my unexpected violence. (I’m proud to say I’ve punched no one since.) On the playground I experienced anger that rises like lava. I learned how easy it is to lash out. I decided I hated the way it felt. 

…

Yes, a lot of people have bad playground memories. I talked with friends just this morning who said they remember the low intensity but unrelenting bullying and being bullied. 

I’ve probably spent too much time remembering what happened all those years ago. But here’s what I’m wondering.

There are so many words about how we ought to act, about who’s moral, and about who’s a scumbag. We live in a sea of words and cautions and announcements and expectations about how we are “supposed” to act now that we are whomever we are.

Yet what sticks with us grows out of movement, out of talking with others when we are scared or worried. We grow out of what we do and where we ramble. We grow out of the challenging things we attempt more than the old tricks we know how to do without thinking. 

So if we need more courage or self-esteem or whatever, maybe we should find some monkey bars. Maybe we can’t Double Dutch anymore but I bet we can jump higher than we think. 

The merging from movement to knowing who we are is fascinating and is worth playing at. And who knows, maybe there is someone out there who will ask us to be their one true love for a while.