Games, by Phillip Hoyle

As a kid I never much liked games of competition, but I did like games of simulation. The former were based on beating others—winning. My early aversion arose most likely from my lack of physical strength and coordination combined with my weak skills in strategizing. If I ran a race, I simply ran. The problem was that I ran too slowly. I couldn’t throw balls far or fast and the balls rarely showed up where I thought I was throwing them. At the shooting range I couldn’t see very well even though I had no idea of that. Then when I got corrective lenses I never could figure out how to compensate. I had a hard time concentrating on activities that didn’t capture my imagination.

I avoided football and baseball. I was attracted to basketball, but I wasn’t even a good basketball player. I wasn’t aggressive enough and didn’t care to be better than the other guys. But growing up I did like games like War, Cops and Robbers, and my favorite, Cowboys and Indians. I probably liked the costuming, props, and improvisatory acting. I was especially repelled by party games—games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or dropping clothes pins into milk bottles. I could play cards: War, Canasta, Gin Rummy, Pinochle, Poker, and Pitch, but I abhorred spin the bottle. I wasn’t interested to kiss anyone (well until 10^th grade when I learned to kiss Buddy).

I started working in churches fulltime in 1970 at the outbreak of the Learning Games Movement. Some of these were pretty awful and met strong resistance particularly from adult groups. I did like the Simulation Games—an accommodation of military training practices used to introduce students to strategic thinking as related to their topics of study. (It seems strange that I liked them given their origins!) Of course school teachers had long used competitive games like spelling bees and other more complicated ones like debate. Even in my high school years church youth rallies sported television game-show-inspired competitions over biblical knowledge pitting teams from neighboring churches. Although I knew the Bible pretty well, I never was interested to use the knowledge for purposes of showing off. It seemed somehow antithetical to the sense of charity or cooperation I learned from the Good Book’s best teachings. And remember, I was not very competitive.

During the 70s the New Games Movement started introducing cooperative games strategized to create community—Hippie-inspired group play that featured Earth Balls and sometimes flowers. I started developing similar games—both the New Games and Simulations—for youth retreats and elementary residential camps, ones related directly to the curricular themes and that often involved the creation of environments, for example, a simulated archaeological dig or a Middle-Eastern marketplace. These were much more related to the simulation games of childhood than they were to sporting events, and they proved effective in teaching.

To this day I fail to understand any competition that devalues human life—either that of an individual or of a group. Still I do appreciate the grace and power of athletes. I also like a couple of card games that have so little strategy as not to stifle conversation among the players. But I don’t like playing even those games with players who take winning too seriously.

Lest you think I am just an old stick in the mud, I will admit to enjoying the Christmas games my youngest granddaughters planned for our family. They involved individuals and teams. My favorite was the Reindeer Game. For my team I hurriedly blew up and tied off small balloons until I was out of breath and feeling very light headed. The balloons were then stuffed into panty hose. The team that first successfully filled the legs like antlers and whose reindeer donned them first won. Selected for the honor of being the reindeer were my son Michael and his wife Heather. They looked bizarrely cute, but my favorite part of that game was my daughter Desma’s story of trying to purchase panty hose. Suppliers have become rare. Finally she found a store that still carries them. The clerk said, “Yes, we have them. You must be going to play the Reindeer Game; it’s all the rage at the State workers’ office parties this year. You got here just in time.” Handing Desma the hosiery she said, “Here are the last two pair.”

Oh the games people play.

© 16 January 2017 

About the Author 

 Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Connections, by Gail Klock

This is an extremely difficult topic for me to write about because it reaches into the deepest places of pain within my psyche. There have been many times in my life when I have felt extremely isolated, lacking a connection to anyone. I was the little child in kindergarten who chose to work on jigsaw puzzles during chose time because it was the only activity which involved no interaction with others, all the time hearing the other kids laughing and playing and wanting to be with them. In college, when on a camping trip with a class, I laid awake all night feeling totally isolated with others all around me, I felt like I was losing my mind. It was one of the longest nights in my life. The terror I was feeling was due to the fact I felt isolated, but I was too afraid to admit it. In both instances, and others like them, if I had only been able to reach out and say help me, I would have been okay. But I had learned to lock my fears away, I knew they were not to be hung out like dirty laundry. I came from a very stoic German family which mistakenly didn’t ask for help, even when it was needed. There was instead a false sense of pride in handling, or appearing to handle, all life’s trauma’s by ourselves. The reality was we all needed help, especially when Karl died at the age of two. Of course back in the fifties this type of help was not advocated or available. My dad’s yelling at my mom not to cry on the way to Karl’s funeral was not because he was a heartless bastard, it was because he was such a sensitive man, who loved this little child so much and his wife and his other children and he couldn’t deal with his own pain, much less take on and help the rest of us deal with ours, which he felt was his responsibility because he was the man of the house. These feelings never left him, they choked him until the day he died. When he was in hospice, a few weeks after my mother had unexpectedly died, he lamented to me he felt so guilty and helpless because he wasn’t there for her when she passed away. He was referring to the evening of the night when she died in her sleep. She had collapsed in the bathroom and he didn’t have the physical strength to help her up so he had to call the neighbors to help him get her up and to bed. He didn’t realize he had been there for her; he had nearly died the day after Christmas, just a month before, but after a week stay in the hospital he unexpectedly made it home. She had told all of us that she was not going to let my dad die first, she couldn’t handle the death of another person she loved so much. She prayed nightly, and I think quit taking her heart meds, for this to be the case. She died precisely as she prayed for, in her own bed, in her own home, next to her husband. My dad was there for her, by making the call for help to the neighbors, he provided the means to her prayers.

It was as this four year old child that I began to surmise that when in pain you don’t cry and you don’t ask for help. This was solidified further by my mother’s inability to provide emotional support to me or my brother due to her own debilitating grief. This was the point in my life when I began to experience a lack of connection with others. This was triggered once again when I was in college and became aware of my homosexuality. I instinctively knew, as did my girlfriend, not to reveal our relationship to anyone else. And in the hiding of who I was I was once again isolated from society, I could sense the darkness beginning to overtake me but I didn’t want to ask for help and I doubted there was any to be found. After all I had learned in my psychology class that homosexuality was a mental illness and I couldn’t face the label of being mentally ill. This was further exacerbated by the fact my grandmother had been in the state mental hospital in Pueblo and no one in the family understood why. None of us ever knew the diagnoses – but I did know from my visits to the hospital with my mom that I didn’t want to be sent there. It was very frightening to me as a child to realize my grandmother was locked up. So to avoid a similar fate, I ironically locked myself up, tighter and tighter. The longer I stayed in the closet the more I felt disconnected from mainstream society.

When I experience this feeling of disconnect I am unable to feel, it is as though I am locked away from everything, including myself. It is sometimes difficult to access the key which frees me from my emotional shackles and allows me to deal with the feelings which I am blocking. I have learned through years of therapy that I need to let myself feel the underlying feelings, which are either sadness or fear. It has taken me years to learn this and also to learn these negative feelings are not permanent and that it is normal to experience them.  I know this and most of the time I can do it, but I wish I could do it all the time and more quickly.

I have also learned that life presents us with lots of self-fulfilling moments, that is to say if I go into a situation expecting it to be enjoyable and thinking people will like me and want to connect with me, they do. And likewise if I anticipate the opposite I generally leave thinking I had been right, I was going to have an unenjoyable time, I wasn’t going to connect with others, and I didn’t. It’s that old bit of seeing a group of people laughing and looking at you. You might think, “They’re all looking at me and think I look fat in my outfit”, or you might think “They look like a fun group of people who like to laugh, I think I’ll join them.”

Sunday mornings for the past twelve years, minus a few months here and there, and Monday afternoons for the past two and a half years, have been an immensely important source of connection for me. I know when I walk into the Golden Recreation Center on Sundays and the Center on Monday afternoons I will feel connected with whomever I encounter there, be it a woman with a basketball or a fellow storyteller with a story. Feeling a sense of connection and the inherent sense of acceptance by my friends is what makes life worth living.

© 17 April 2017 

About the Author 

I grew up in Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents. Upon completion of high school, I attended Colorado State University majoring in Physical Education. My first teaching job was at a high school in Madison, Wisconsin. After three years of teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. After obtaining my MSPE I coached basketball, volleyball, and softball at the college level starting with Wake Forest University and moving on to Springfield College, Brown University, and Colorado School of Mines.

While coaching at Mines my long-term partner and I had two daughters through artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home required by coaching, I resigned from this position and got my elementary education certification. I taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County Schools for ten years. As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.

As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.

Sports by Ricky

While growing up, I loved to play some physically active games that would be called by the general term “sports”. In grade school in Cambridge, Minnesota, I liked to play one version of marbles.

During some past construction on the school grounds a couple of 8-foot tall piles of dirt were left on the edge of the playground right next to the surrounding woods. As a 3rd and 4th grader, I played “King of the Hill” with classmates. It was fun to climb to the top while others tried to do the same all the while trying to keep me from getting to the top. Of course I was also trying to stop them as well. I got to the top many times but it was impossible to stay there with all the pushing and shoving. Sliding or rolling down the side of the dirt hill was also fun. Sadly, the playground teachers finally put a stop to our play and made the hill forbidden territory. Being boys, we naturally disobeyed and played on the hill anyway but more secretively.

In the winter we would build snowmen and snow-forts on the playground from which we would have snowball fights. The teachers did not interfere as long as we were not throwing “ice balls”.

Back in California, in 5th grade we would play organized games for some PE class times, games like kick-ball, jump rope, and tether-ball. Organized PE time did not occur very often so we boys chose to play softball in the spring and autumn and touch or flag football in late autumn and throughout the winter.

The summer I turned 11, I began to try out for Little League baseball. I was not good enough for a “major” team but I did play two years on a “minor league” team.

In high school during PE classes, I learned to play football much better but I could not throw the ball well enough to be a quarterback and I was too light to be of much use blocking. Also, I was not all that fast running so while I enjoyed playing the game, I was not future NFL material. During our basketball scrimmages, I loved to play but could not dribble the ball very well nor could I shoot and sink baskets consistently. My shooting never got better. My best friend and I did do very well in the badminton tournament however and we loved to play it.

During those four years of high school, the New York Yankees were my favorite baseball team because my favorite players were on that team. They were Mickey Mantle (my favorite), Roger Maris, and Yogi Berra. While most of my peers could cite team and player statistics ad nausium, I could not care less about those statistics, the same for professional or college teams. My favorite football team was not formed until the Minnesota Vikings was formed. It might seem strange that a California boy would have a Minnesota team as his favorite, but we were connected by circumstance. I lived for a time in Minnesota and my high school’s mascot was and still is the Vikings.

After high school my interest in sports gradually waned as I grew older. The only exception is for my college’s teams. But even then, I grew tired of watching the football team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The last time I got excited for a sport was when my oldest daughter developed a crush on Jose Canseco and his baseball team. So, for three years I became a baseball fan again. She lost interest and one year later so did I. Not until the Colorado Rockies went to the World Series did I catch baseball fever again. Fortunately, I recovered.

It all boils down to this. For me, I would rather play a game for fun rather than sit, watch, or listen to it. Sports like boxing, golf, swimming, track and field, auto racing, horse racing, air races, fencing, bobsledding, mountain climbing, and skiing, hold no interest for me even to participate in them. The only sport I would enjoy would be to lie on a deserted beach with my companion some late evening and watch the submarine races while making out.

© 3 November 2014

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com