Four Square

This afternoon I went to a Memorial Day BBQ today hosted by Pat. A lot of friends gathered to eat, talk, throw around the pig skin, and play four square. It was a great afternoon- cool and overcast but still a wonderful day.

It reminded of college for a couple reasons. At the BBQ, inexplicably, I saw a guy I went to college with: Josh. I hadn't seen him since our days together at ISU 8 years ago. We were acquaintances, never really friends, but we had a running bit that we did the entire time I was there. We would always greet each other as "friend" and never say each others names. It started out I think because we didn't know each others names and we had talked too often to ask without insult. That eventually morphed into some weird badge of pride of not knowing each others names. Towards the end of my senior year he found out my name and I found out his. As a result our interactions lost some of their magic. But some of that magic resurfaced today because I couldn't dredge up his name from my sordid college memories. I don't think he noticed.

The other thing was playing four square. It's a game I remember loving in grade school and then didn't play again until college where I fell in love with it again. The ISU theater department had a weird tradition of playing whenever it was nice in front of the building. They also hosting a four square marathon fundraising event at the end of the year. My sophomore year of college I hadn't really played much. It was a way to socialize with people I didn't know and I shied away from it. At the end of my sophomore year I felt a little more involved, a little more a part of so at around 10 in the evening of the first day I started to play.

The hours past and partying theater students came and went. I kept on playing and gradually struck up conversations with strangers and people I had seen around but never spoke to. The mechanics of the game came back quickly and I started to really enjoy this simple childish game. Around two in the morning everyone started to filter away or take naps inside the building to recuperate. Me and a couple other die hards kept playing. I started to get tired but pushed through. Kept moving, kept playing and from 3am to around 7am I hit the zone. I hit my second wind that was like a smooth plateau. Not to say that I was playing amazing four square because I wasn't but it was this zen like place of calm and endurance. It was like everything faded away and the world was just a ball and four squares and potential jokes to be made. I wasn't tired, I wasn't sore, I was comfortable in my body and able to control it. It was a very alive type of feeling. Around nine in the morning I crashed, I was sore and tired and dead on my feet. People started coming back and the people that had played the graveyard shift were relieved.

So it was weird, seeing someone from college and playing a game I so closely associated with college. It brought back some good memories and some bad ones. But today looking up at the clouds, surrounded by talented, kind, gracious friends I thought- there's no where I'd rather be.