Homo Ludens [ET Playing]

One of my Dad’s dominant characteristics was his playfulness.  In fact, if there was any “play DNA” in us it came from him, not from my mother, Dollie.  I knew this as a child, long before I found a sophisticated study of the role of play in culture in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Man Playing, while preparing for a graduate class.

Nearly 14 years ago my dad’s [ET, his “real name”] life ended at the Teton Lakes Golf Course, just as he had wished.  In the middle of what he loved to call a “medium wedgy” about 80 yards out from the Third Hole, sitting just behind those massive, sometimes frustrating Cottonwoods, he took his last happy swing at life and died before he hit the ground.

Huizinga taught me two things about Dad’s obsession with play: [1] play is fun [OK] and is an “escape from the ordinary pattern of life.”  In other words, though we move into play we discover another order, i.e., rules and boundaries, etc.

Because Dad and Mom began their life [1939] in Bishop, California, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Range, Dad entered a man’s ideal playground.  It was high desert country graced with the Owen’s River, which flowed out of Lake Crowley, its source in the Nevada Range.  The Owen’s River cut across Bishop, then entered the state’s longest aqueduct, carrying precious water to thirsty LA. The Bishop joke was “when you drink a glass of water, somebody in Los Angeles goes thirsty.”  LA owned the water rights to Bishop, and that meant they owned a little town that could never grow.  It was all about water—and still is.  So I grew up betwixt two worlds as the oldest child:  Playing Man and Frustrated Woman—frustrated with her nerves, with the constant Mojave Desert wind, and Playing Man.

Dad could manage a canoe with a fly rod where no other fisherman would go. He shot ducks, skied famous Mammoth Mountain in the early 40s when it  had only a tow rope.  He ice skated, played golf [mornings at 5 except Sunday], bowled, played tennis [he won the city championship for his category twice in Bishop and once in Escondido].  He even learned to fly airplanes:  BT-13s, towing gliders, a Cessna and later a Beechcraft his brother owned.

The airplanes nearly changed the marriage—for the worst.  Dad, no one could ever explain how—entangled the Beechcraft in some electric lines just outside the approach to the airport.  Somehow, he did not stall or crash.  Safe Landing.  Trouble at Home.

He and Bob Simon, [Simon held the altitude record for gliding for many years], often glided together up in the high Sierras.  One day, gliding alone, Simon floated into trouble.  A vicious downdraft, instead of a thermal, smacked his glider into the Rocky Mountains.  That ended Bob's life and Dad’s infatuation with gliders.  Trouble at Home.

Dad rolled the Beechcraft into the hanger, so to speak, attended Bob’s funeral, then promised Mom an end to further flight.  “I had to cut his wings,” she laughed later.  And he laughed with her, bemused at how many crazy things he had done while she kept her shoulder to the wheel at home—listening to the wind.

The deeper, personal question here is why I’m not Homo Ludens. Yes, handball with English faculty friends, a little junior varsity baseball in high school and a summer, then even a couple of years of golfing with Pop, but nothing after 4 p.m.  And never at night.  Why?

I think the tears and occasional arguments between my parents spooked me away from play.  As the oldest, I had responsibilities at home with a mother who relied on me.  Don’t let this drift into Maudlin Land.  True, it was my mother who would say to us, usually late afternoon, “Ok, stop; you’ve had quite enough fun for one day.”  Play was a quantity, not a quality.

It was guilt, was it not?  I simply could not “escape” into another world,  a world besides the “ordinary” one I was living in, even though I loved the friendship, the bantering, the competition [to some extent].  My son-in-law, Ron, says I’m “no fun at board games because I don’t care enough to win.” Yes, Ron, it doesn’t seem to matter.  Why?  I don’t know.

My siblings are pretty good players, I guess.  No, I retract-- my brothers and my sister do not play either.  Maybe I carried something into my marriage I didn’t know I had.  Yes, BOREDOM, you say.  That too, but I guess I had engrained the drill too late or too early, depending on your view.  I realize now that no backpack guide or aerobics instructor would have me.  “No pain, no gain.”  Forget the gain, I guess.

I close, however, by encouraging play.  My son can play; my grandchildren and sons-in-law are great players.  Here I am in my sixth year of retirement.  But still, I do not play, though I wish—sort of, that I did.  I think it might have made me a more interesting person.

But I don’t play...yet.