Hopscotch

On my walk home from work three days ago I noticed a pink and blue chalk etching of a hopscotch line.*

*I don't know that I've ever before played hopscotch and if I have, I'm certain I didn't play it correctly. I'm not even really sure what the thing kids jump on is called. I mean, I know that they're literally jumping on the sidewalk, but doesn't the sidewalk turn into something when you draw numbered hopscotch boxes on it? I was always under the impression that hopscotch was what you did, not what you did it on. Are you hopscotching or are you jumping on the hopscotch?

I thought nothing of it three days ago. It was poorly created, the chalked lines were uneven, shaky and faint and the numbers inside each box were barely legible. I'm not sure I would've recognized them as numbers had I not already known that numerals were supposed to go inside the boxes.

Three days ago, it was fairly easy for me to glance at the 50 hopscotch boxes and forget I ever saw them. Some kids had a nice weekend. It's better than playing videogames, Twittering about how atrocious the new Facebook layout is or putting the finishing touches on the new meth lab. Good for the kids. One point for the antiquated ideal of youth.

Two days ago I noticed the hopscotch boxes had extended to the end of the block. There were 650 boxes now. I imagined the calf muscles these tiny children were going to have by the end of this hopscotch game.* I was happy the children were setting lofty goals for themselves and playing outside in order to attain those goals.

*Again, forgive my hopscotch naivete, but I'm not sure how one wins the game. For the sake of this blog, I'll assume one wins only after their opponent trips while hopping and crumbles to the ground. Kinda like Russian drinking games, but instead of trading shots of vodka, it's hopscotch and instead of barfing, it's falling.

Yesterday, I came upon the hopscotch again and found two kids, a boy and a girl, both about 11-years-old, at the end of the massive row of hopscotch boxes. I've made it quite clear at this point that I'm ignorant to all things hopscotch,* so perhaps I've got it all wrong, but they seemed a little old for hopscotch. These two kids really looked 11 and by the time I was 11, I was playing baseball. I don't want to come off as any sort of elitist, but a baseball field's chalk lines indicating fair and foul are about the only things that a sport like baseball and a children's game like hopscotch have in common. I was a little disheartened that these kids looked 11 and not six.

*I'm close to being ignorant about all things scotch. I'm clueless on hopscotch, I know nothing about the whiskey, except that it makes me want to die just sniffing it. I run shallow on my Scottish history other than that I really dig the Fratellis. My only saving grace is that I know shit loads of stuff about Scotch tape. For instance, did you know that "cellophane tape" originated with two sticky sides instead of one (what we now call double-sided tape), but to cut costs, 3M produced the tape with only one sticky side? A Minnesota automobile trader said that the Scotch bosses at 3M were stingy and the name stuck (no pun intended).

Anyway, they had traversed the street and had continued on the adjacent sidewalk starting at 651. I wondered what they would do about the 20 feet in between hopscotch box 650 on one side of the street and hopscotch box 651 on the other. Was the street a free zone? Are you allowed to have a free zone in hopscotch?

Is it halftime?

It didn't really matter. The street, the ever-growing numbers, the ages of the kids, the rules of the game. None of it mattered. Kids will be kids. They were setting goals. Fun goals. Innocent goals.

As I walked closer to the children etching an even greater number of chalk boxes, I noticed that one kid wasn't helping the other. The boy was, in fact, slapping the nearby concrete with a fallen tree branch. The girl was etching each box with what can only be called careless consumption. There was no effort put into each box (which was why a box created by an 11-year-old looked to have been created by a six-year-old). She wasn't making a hopscotch table, she was absently drawing boxes and numbering them, like she had nothing better to do.

There were no rocks, no hopping, no competition. Nothing. Just two stupid kids spending the time not taken up by drooling to stand around doodling on the ground with blue and pink chalk.

What a betrayal! This was not a quaint hearkening back to Opie Taylor or Wally and the Beav'. This was two uncreative, bored-ass idiots drawing boxes on the ground and swinging sticks around like a bunch of Appalachian mounties. Video games would have been better. The meth labs, the Facebook... all better than this idle nothingness.

Ever see a toddler with pudding smeared all over his or her face? Sure, part of you is sad that the child has gross poop-like desert gelatin surrounding its mouth, but most of you is annoyed that that child hasn't got the sense to wipe off the mess or not allow the mess to happen in the first place.

In that analogy hopscotch is the pudding.

Here I thought these kids were the last vestige of old fashioned outdoor play. Overachieving competitors in a simple elementary game. Turns out they're just "Deliverance" with a pail-full of chalk nubs in place of banjos.

Oh the humanity.

Tortoistory

Most mornings are the same: I wake up (sorta), fall asleep in the shower until the water goes from warm to cold, dress in the dark praying that my socks end up matching and go to the celarium of my apartment where my tortoise Tillie sleeps.

I assume she sleeps there, everytime I stand at her tank to check on her, her eyes are open.

She's alert and skeptical.

She hears my footsteps and imagines that it's bath time, her least favorite time of each month. Imagine your haircut and dentist appointment rolled into one terrifying trip.

That's bath time for Tillie.

So when I say that she sleeps in her tank, I'm just assuming. I really don't know.

What I do know is that after I've changed my socks around three times so that they match, visit Tillie, feed her and change her water, she's already up. Always. No matter what time I get up in the morning, she's standing in her food dish waiting for me.

When I wake up at six, it's easy to assume she's only been standing there a few minutes or so. When I get up at nine and recall the times I've been up at six, I imagine my bratty little tortoise standing on the equivalent of her breakfast plate for damn near three hours. Can you imagine if your children pulled that shit?

It's possible that she hears me get up in the morning and falls into first position, but my room is far away from her tank, so I doubt it.

Editor's note: I just Wikipedied "tortoise" and found nothing about them having sensitive hearing. I'll continue assuming there is nothing noteworthy about tortoise's hearing, especially after I double-checked my work by entering "human" and also saw no notations on us having special hearing.

Because humans have no special hearing, I can only deduce that neither do tortoises.

It's bad enough that she is standing on top of her food dish like some radical hippie protester, but because tortoises don't make noise or show any emotion whatsoever, my American sensitivity processes this as hostility. My understanding of pets (and our love affair with having them) comes from an exchange of shelter and food for undying affection. But that's not the vibe I get from Tillie. Now firmly entrenched in reptilian adolescents, Tillie can only be seen as an uppity spoiled teen. Nothing I do is right, she never wants to hang out and walk on the floor near me anymore. She sleeps all day and (apparently) is up all night waiting to be fed.

Where did I go wrong with her?