Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
‘Panem et circenses’ is a Latin phrase popularized a long time ago in Imperial Rome; translated, it means “bread and circuses.” In other words, a political practice where a totalitarian regime keeps its subjects pacified by free food and ever-increasingly violent entertainment. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The circus in the Roman Era meant chariot races, bear baiting, gladiators and even human sacrifice. We’re not quite that far gone, but the media presents us with the same menu, albeit fictional, on every flickering electronic device we own.
At the end of it all, it remains a game.
I had the pleasure of playing a lot of games over the last 11 days. It was our post-Christmas visit to the Steel City and a week-and-a-half of playing grandparents to our rapidly growing granddaughters, Jayne and Norah.
Every age with a grandchild is the best, even the teenage years, when they often battle everything except grandma and grandpa. Jayne is 8 and Norah 6, perfect ages for board games, card games and those elementary school games we all played so long ago.
Epic games of hide and go seek in the front yard, or when the temperature dropped, and snow rolled in off the Great Lakes inside the house.
‘Man from Mars,’ ‘What Time Is It Mr. Fox,’ and a simple game of jumping from one square to another in a four-square grid on the driveway as one player calls out a number, and if you’re in the square, you’re out. The girls loved it, Sue and I perhaps even more.
I taught Jayne how to play chess a couple of years ago. She’s gotten pretty good at it, though she still needs to work on her knight play early in the game.
Norah loves Yahtzee and won every game we played. The kid rolled at least one Yahtzee in every game and had three in one epic blowout. Maybe it’s the rhythm of her rapid shaking of the dice in the plastic cup. It was an old Yahtzee game from the 1960s that still had the names of Sue’s parents and siblings on many of the scorecards.
Racko, bingo, and Uno also filled the evenings after homework and dinner were finished. The girl’s aunt and uncle, Katelin and Brian, gave them a subscription to KiwiCo, an assembly kit that arrives each month. We helped them assemble a bow-and-arrow set, a spinning art kit, and a couple of pinball machines. Think of it as an Erector Set and Tinkertoys combined.
An epic week for a couple of aging kids and their grandparents.
We live in a magical age. At 5:15 am Eastern time, we said goodbye to the girls and Staci. Adam drove us to the newly remodeled Pittsburgh Airport. It is a marvel of convenience. Not a major hub, but just big enough to send flights to dozens and dozens of destinations on four ample concourses.
On a bumpy ride to Denver, I thought about the connection generated between the fanatical following of professional sports, both collegiate and post-collegiate. College football, men’s basketball, and baseball are now professional occupations, with many players holding off from signing with the NFL, NBA, or MLB because they’d take a pay cut. Strange times indeed.
You can now earn more money as a high school basketball player in a single season than the average American earns in a lifetime. We once studied the Romans; we’ve become them.
As the cartoon character Pogo so famously said during the Vietnam War, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
We spend our lives bound by the golden handcuffs of the daily 9 to 5, trying to make ends meet, fighting through waves of corporate greed that would take everything away from us except a high interest credit card and some kid with a quick crossover move and a great long range shot earns more than most people can ever dream of in a four-month high school basketball season. It boggles the mind.
On that turbulent United Flight from the Steel City to the Mile High City, I texted notes to myself for this column. On these long flights, I have a playlist of a few thousand songs in MP3 format on my phone that I listen to on a set of Bluetooth headphones.
As I dutifully thought of connections between hide-and-seek, high school basketball, and the Roman Coliseum, one of my favorite songs came on, “The River is Wide” by the Grassroots.
The sky was clear on that windy day
‘Til the clear blue sky began to turn to grey
The lightning flashed, the thunder roared above
Then fell a drop of rain to start our love
Let the river get wide, the river gets long now
The water runs deep as our love gets strong now
So baby, don’t you fight and say you belong now
To me
Upon the roof we heard the gentle rain
With the rhythm of our heartbeats down it came
As it hit each drop our hearts could feel the pain
No one on earth can stop a drop of rain
The Grassroots were awesome, packing years of Top 40 hits into the AM radio standard of 2:45 to three-minute songs.
How does this connect to children’s games, professional sports, and political distraction? We’re all in the river, from that first raindrop until it’s swollen into an unstoppable force like the Mississippi in flood stage that sweeps us inevitably down the channel of life.
Despite our best efforts, the end is inevitable. “No one on earth can stop a drop of rain.”
We can only get hit by that raindrop, prepare as best we can, and ride the waves.
We arrived in Denver around 10 am, then flew to Riverton on the afternoon flight. After unpacking, playing with our other two grandchildren, Morgan and Matthew, for a little while, when Brian and Katelin brought them by, I fed the cows, then loaded up my gear for one of my favorite rivalries, the Wind River / Shoshoni basketball game.
Last night, it was in Shoshoni, and the Wrangler boys and girls rolled over the Cougars easily. A whirlwind day, saying goodbye to our girls 1700 miles away, arriving home 11 hours later, and then getting back into the flow.
Yep, I was a little tired when I got home at 9 pm last night.
Games. You have a choice which ones you play, which ones are important, and even more emphatically, how you play them.
When done well, it pulls at your soul.