Free Time

If you arrived early enough at Summit Avenue Middle School in 1974 you might learn something. I’d show up a half-hour before the first bell, the sun cool and low and still rising behind that old building, throwing its wide shadow across the paved playground and its three swings and its two basketball hoops with chain nets. We played outside unsupervised until the teachers threw open the doors and told us to line up for class.

I liked that time before school because there was always a game of some kind happening. Sometimes it was kickball or football or the strange primitive game of wallball, where one kid threw a tennis ball high off a wall so that it sailed into a crowd of boys who jumped as one and tried to catch it, thereby winning the honor of throwing the ball. I could have played that game all day. Because there were so few rules, there was less cause of argument. Most of the other games ended in fights rather than victory or loss.

Summit was as diverse as the elementary school I’d attended prior, but I had been so within the cocoon of childhood then that I’d hardly noticed the other kids. They were just a mass of faces and bodies of which I was a part. Now, standing at the gates to the playground, having walked alone through the morning streets, I saw the milling, running, jumping, talking, screaming crowd and noticed the differences.

There were the girls and there were the boys, and the white kids and the black kids and the Portuguese and Asian kids. There were the blond and red-head kids with freckles who talked of attending mass on Sundays, and the kids who didn’t celebrate Easter. There were the kids who lived in big houses and kids who lived in apartments, kids who played the games and the kids who never played the games. And all these kids, for all their differences, had one thing in common: none of them were me.

Not that I thought I was so very unique, I just knew they weren’t thinking exactly what I was thinking, had not seen exactly what I had seen or been where I had been, and that they did not care about exactly what I cared about in the way I cared about it. This was true of my younger brother and older sister too, of my mother and father, and of Palmer, the boy I considered my best friend.

What bonded me to anyone was what interested them. That’s what I’d be sniffing out as I wandered into the playground, scanning the other faces for someone who looked like he or she might want to play the way I liked to play. It was hard to tell, frankly, and why I often ended up playing wallball. It was easy to join, there were no teams to throw out of balance, just the mosh pit of boys wanting to catch that tennis ball. You could play as long as you felt like and then leave when you were done, and the game went on just fine without you.

I had no illusions about how much I might have in common with the other boys leaping for the tennis ball. Sometimes I felt like I had absolutely nothing in common with anyone. I’d leave the game of wallball and wander the periphery of the playground, drifting into my imagination. It was as if in all the running and jumping and screaming and playing, all the noise and energy of it, I could lose track of what actually interested me, and then I was no longer a friend to myself. I sensed that I could only meet myself when left entirely on my own, and so I’d get as far away from the other kids as that playground allowed. I knew it probably looked a bit unfriendly to the others, but it had to be done.

That free, noisy, morning playtime seemed both long and short. If you got lost in a game, time had no meaning, there was only the ball and the other bodies and bringing your complete attention to both. But you could lose interest in a game and then you’d remember what you were all waiting for, when those doors would open and your time would belong to the school and its rules and requirements.

The classroom wasn’t a terrible place for me, it was peaceful and orderly, if a little boring. Every classroom had a large, round clock on the wall behind the teacher’s desk, its second-hand tick, tick, ticking away the hours. It was never a good idea to watch that clock. It was the most unfriendly face I saw each day. I had nothing in common with it. I only wanted to be free, and if school taught me anything it was that I would spend the better part of my life learning I already was.

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This post is republished on medium.

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