Anna and Kelly's Game
9-9-03 by Derek Hugen
I am laid back in the recliner. I am watching Anna and Kelly as they squeak their little plastic shopping cart across the nursery floor. The shopping cart has long since become a makeshift stroller to their three-year old eyes, and I doubt that they could recognize it as anything else. For the boys it had become a race car, and whenever it was employed as such, the girls had looked on mortified at their stroller tearing across the room in a figure-eight pattern between the chair and the pole in the center of the room. For now, it remains a stroller. Their dolly is pleased by this and she sits contented in her stroller, only seldom falling from her seat and being trampled by the wheels, and then thrown back surprisingly unceremoniously by Anna and Kelly into the stroller. I myself am somewhat preoccupied by my wandering thoughts of male/female roles in society, and instinctual versus learned behavior within the developmental process. But mostly, I am just thinking about this Rambo-style machine gun buried somewhere inside a box in the back of my closet. I have a picture of myself, before I had lost its plastic clip, and I am holding the machine gun and I'm wearing full army fatigues, and a karate headband. Within this picture I am still six years old, and it is still Christmas morning, and I suddenly have a battle to fight, and bad guys who need to get killed, and I have full army fatigues, and a Rambo-style machine gun that helps me out with this process. Not that I need the machine gun, though. I do know karate, after all... But my attention is suddenly thrown back to Anna and Kelly who have abandoned their dolly to choose another game. Hide-and-Go-Seek. What interests me is the new rule modifications they have instated. I think that with these changes, Hide-and-Go-Seek has become one of my favorite games. I look forward to a day when I can go to a party, and someone will suggest a rousing game of Hide-and-Go-Seek to entertain us all for hours. Kelly suggests the game, and so it is her turn to hide. She quickly recaps the rules. Anna has to go to the corner and count to five. Then she can turn around and look for Kelly. Then comes the new rule modification. Kelly tells Anna that she will hide behind the park bench. So, Anna counts to five. She skips four. She is really excited. She turns around, and looks straight at the park bench. Her eyes light up. She grins, then screams out, "I FOUND YOU!" Kelly jumps up from behind the bench and she beams with her excitement. "Okay, now I'll count, and YOU hide behind the bench!" I smile. I wish I could still understand life that way. |