so on saturday, meghan and i decided to put our i’m-terminally-ill-from-seattle-and-only-have-enough-energy-to-cry-while-watching-grey’s-anatomy acts on hold and go outside to play. we walked (yes, walked(!)) to our local park and tromped around in streams and exotic plants for awhile (it may have been more sewer run-off and overgrown weeds, but for the sake of the story, let’s stick with what sounds better here.)
things really picked up when we found a frisbee. hallelujah! sent from the gods for our entertainment! we played for a bit and then got bored and decided it would be the moral thing for us to find the frisbee’s original owner, but since that’s next to impossible, we instead hooked the frisbee onto a empty flag pole and raised it up so it was in plain view for the owner to see and come retrieve. how nice are we?
our next discovery was an old soccer ball. hallelujah amen! could this day seriously get any better (the obvious retrospective answer is yes, but at this point in the story, we didn’t know that) we played with that for a second and then a park ranger came driving up to us. we braced ourselves for the inevitable separation of the stolen ball, but instead, the park ranger offered us a new shiny orange soccer ball in place of our old one! how nice is that? you steal something and then replace it for something even nicer, but still sort-of stolen! i felt the joy i think robin hood feels when he steals from other people and then gets rewarded, only i don’t remember him ever getting a nice shiny orange soccer ball.
so, we merrily rolled along with the newest member of our family until we were stopped in our tracks. at least a dozen high-school-aged boys dressed in makeshift outfits, looking like a combination somewhere between braveheart and zelda, marched right in front of us! what the?? so naturally, we followed them – we probably could have been more discreet (ie. – stop kicking our bright orange soccer ball and don’t laugh right out loud). it didn’t really matter, though – as far as they were concerned, we didn’t even exist. some had pillow-shields (use your imagination), some had homemade bows and arrows/swords/bombs/any other type of weapon boys can think up…of course, every weapon was covered in a dish rag or something soft so as not to actually kill each other. that was at least a relief since we didn’t want them to make a faulty throw and deflate our soccer ball.
they finally stopped in this wooded field and jumped right in – two teams, lots of screaming and throwing of dish rag weapons. when somebody got hit, they had to freeze in place. i’m not quite sure what made it okay to stop freezing in place, but every so often, freezers would become movers again. each battle only seemed to last a minute or so and then somebody would inevitably start yelling at somebody else that they weren’t following “the rules” and both teams would put aside their war-evoking differences to huddle together in an inspiring moment of peace and discuss what “rules” were broken and how to fix it in the next round. i’m not sure why this was the topic of conversation rather than arranging a peace treaty or something, but sometimes war just isn’t that easy. so, the battle would always start again…of course, until another “rule” was cheated.
we never picked up on the rules…or the point…of the game, but finally forced ourselves to break free from the trance this thing was placing on us and move on with our lives. our lives, of course, that consisted of kicking our soccer ball all the way back home and sitting down for a good, long cry with grey’s anatomy. what a tiring day.
