It was an aimless game with a competitive edge to it, much like the incessant, monotonous drive of Monopoly played for long Saturday afternoons. It whiled away the time and required some finesse with a pocketknife; we all carried them in the 50s, as much a symbol of maturity as of masculinity, symbolic of our emulation of our fathers and as Freudian as one could get.
I recall how i stretched my young finger down the spine of the blade, after countless attempts at discovering methods that would control the flight and drive the feral blade deep into the earth. A pause was required over the land; concentration flowed from the eye into coordination of the hand and the downward, firm thrust of a knife propelled through space until a soft thud was not only heard but sensed, like the sweet spot at the end of a bat. Nothing was as fine to the eye or as comforting to the spirit as the lean and precise cut a sharp blade made in the soil. Upon removing the blade after the thrust from its earthen grip, a stroke or two across one’s dungarees cleansed the tool for a repeat throw.
I drew a large box as square as I could have it with my penknife. Another line bisected it. In the left side a single initial for the other player, on the right side I cut in my signature. The knife was thrown. If it landed upright and sliced itself into the soil, I drew a line with the knife to the perimeter of the square and annexed this territory to my estates. If the knife was cast again and this time it tripped, landing on its side, the other player had his turn. In this way land was divided and sectioned off, odd lots divvied up. I managed to keep what I owned only if the heel of my sneaker fit into the property remaining. Before the game was over the ground had been smudged and rubbed and irritated with sneaker scuffs.
The skills involved were manifold and as patently complex and miniaturized as the contents of an opened watch case. This game of early youth grounded in the incessant soothing of the body — that allayed anxiety other than to create effort — gave sleek shape to growing up — a rhythm in the self, a paralleling to the drift of late afternoons after school or the somber passing of reluctant seasons. “Land” was a game for all seasons, when the earth gave way to an intruder; when conglomerate could be easily upturned from the cloying grip of soil and separated out so that the field might be plowed for our awaiting weaponry.
“Land” was much more than a game, more than a rite of passage, or an index to a season’s efforts by the young; it was context, it bound the young to the soil, it gave the urban young child a relationship to what was often unheeded, the natural order of things. In the “lots” between buildings, the pastures of the inner city, we shepherded ourselves and became contiguous with nature. By playing “Land” we caught the cycle of a part of life, swept away by its spume into adulthood. What “Land” was about was a tie to our comrades, the camaraderie of the new chum. The obsessiveness of “land” was in its repetitiveness, that it began and that it ended, and that in its middle phase curious and fascinating divisions were made: much like the cruelly dispassionate slicing up of a long worm, after a rainfall, vastly more intriguing than either one of its ends.
The other symbiotic game that created internal patterns as complex as an equinox was marbles, spheroids of colors and crystals, of dimensions, that required manual dexterity and the machinations of an Eastern potentate. From the fistula of the hand, the orb departed, expelled from its cradle by the thumb. The intensity by which it was grasped in its nexus of thumb and finger, its omphalos, was directly related to its effect on the playing fields, often the same ground that been cleared for “Land.”
A small crater was excavated and smoothed out by hand. Several steps away we tossed our favorite agate to get close to the rim of the crater, to position ourselves for first or second shot. From here we aimed diligently to smack the other players’ marbles, and like atoms smashing into one another the sweet-smacking sound of glass joining glass cracked acrossed our bodies as we crouched down on one knee. With glee and greed — as primal as pirates — we pocketed the marbles we struck. Like peasants we each had sacks or pockets for stashing our colored glass. The bubbling racket in our pants’ pockets gave way to the possessional feeling of small eruptions across our calves. The feel of marbles against the thigh was comforting, for we had increased our treasure. We relished each cascade.
As we stationed ourselves from angles, aimed and shot with fervor, it was as if neutrinos from the bowels of space shot across our fields; we were gods playing craps for keeps. The physicality of the game, the relationship between eye, target and hand were consummate skills rarely mastered. The marble itself, its pits and pocks, its surface geometry, the soil itself, worked against all best intentions. And we gradually learned about the perversity of inanimate matter; patience brewed; and we hunkered down and waited for amuscade. Much of later life was contained in the randomness, coincidence, luck and stealth of marble playing.
An instinctual as skittering a flat stone across a lake’s surface or casting a lazy line into complacent waters, the games of youth were preparatory. An inner sense of how to spin a rubber ball into a bounced curve or snare backhand, a grounder with an outstretched glove, were seemingly innate givens, human theorems our bodies had metabolized forever. When I am with my children the natural sirens of youth compel me to pass on the arcane lore of my youth; when we fabricated games from mind and imagination; when many toys were handmade from the flora and fauna of the streets; when simple games took years of complex devotion to master; when. . . .
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