9. The Geometry of Surrender

Dearest Family and Friends,

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?

It’s an evocative question, but flip the words around and it becomes even more compelling: If your younger self could see you now, what advice would he give you?

My fourteen-year-old self has been talking to me of late. Of course, he doesn’t give me advice directly. Instead, he placed a particular memory in my seventy-year-old consciousness and I have to figure out why it's there and what it means. 

My memory dates from 1969, when my father took a sabbatical in Berkeley California, the city in which I live today. It was a challenging year for me. I exchanged my cozy Ohio college town — where I knew all the streets and could ride my bicycle till sundown — for an unfamiliar and unruly metropolis. The enormous UC Berkeley campus was on edge, and so was I. Daily protests about the Vietnam war devolved into riots. Barricades were set ablaze and police used tear gas to disperse protesters in the streets. I was enrolled as a freshman in an urban high school that held almost as many people as the town I left behind.

My parents rented a house high up in the North Berkeley hills. Through a large window in the living room I could see the Golden Gate Bridge across the Bay — a spectacular panorama that looked like a screen saver, although there weren’t any screen savers back in 1969. 

On this particular day — the day in my memory — I looked through the living room window and saw dark clouds pouring in from the Pacific. My stomach  tightened. Dark clouds meant rain, and rain meant physical education would be held in the gymnasium, and that meant we would be playing “War Ball.”

I didn’t want to go to school, but I went. In Berkeley, students traveled to high school on a crowded city bus; there were no friendly yellow school buses reserved for children. I took the number sixty-five bus down Euclid Avenue, which was named after Euclid of Alexandria, the famous Greek mathematician and father of the geometry I would be studying later that morning, right before P.E.

By the time my geometry class ended the rain had begun, washing any hope of escaping War Ball down the gutter. Back then, P.E. for boys involved a jock strap and thin white boxer shorts — underwear really — and a white undershirt. I felt naked. The outfit was part of a carefully crafted trauma designed to make men out of us. President Kennedy launched his Council on Physical Fitness in 1961, in response to alarming data showing American children were less fit than their European counterparts, and California schools took the "toughen up and get fit" mandate seriously. Of course it all went sideways, just like the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, and I was on the receiving end. 

I filed into the gymnasium in my thin white shorts. A muscular teacher with a buzz haircut who seemed completely out of place in Berkeley barked out the rules. The gym had a terrible echo and I could only make out some of what he was saying: “Men, divide up on either side of the….rahar, rahar, rahar….grab your balls and …. rahar, rahar, rahar….when you get hit...rahar, rahar, rahar…the team with the last man standing…. rahar, rahar, rahar.…and we call it Warrr Ball. Get out there, men!”

War Ball was basically a brutal form of dodgeball with hard red balls that stung. Anyone with a ball could hurl it at someone on the other team at any time. It was chaos. Get hit anywhere — body, face, crotch — and you were out. The more athletic students would march right up to the dividing line, ball in hand, and fire a missile at someone on the other team. 

Not me. I stayed in the back. I couldn’t throw, but I could dodge — I was quick and had a good sense of balance. When two balls came at me, I mentally bisected their angle and jumped between their paths. This was the geometry of survival. Eventually, our ranks thinned. I was typically one of the last two or three people remaining on my team, and on this particular day I was the only one left. 

Which leads me to the denouement, the final scene in this memory: I faced seven opposing players with balls in their grip and grins on their faces. The futility of my situation was clear to all. I could not dodge that many balls at once. My assailants advanced slowly to the center line. I drew in my breath. And then — unexpectedly — my fear gave way. I looked at my opponents and they looked at me; prey and predator locked eyes and shared a collective, majestic sense of destiny. It was strangely exhilarating. When the balls struck, there was no sting. There was no shame. There was no sense of defeat.

Why, this memory? And why now? At seventy, I am too old to play War Ball. My cohort is busy dodging balls of another sort, trying to maintain some sense of balance in a game we cannot win.

I have too many dear friends who have already been stung. And the revelation for me is that after a month or two, they come to terms with it. In spite of all their worry leading up to that moment, when a ball strikes they adjust. They make do.

We aren't the authors of our lives — we can’t change the game. We are helpless, hapless narrators trying our best to make sense of it all. My friends each missed a few beats when their scripts were wrested from their hands and replaced with a rewrite that was missing many of its original pages. They were given no occasion to rehearse but somehow, after a mysterious transformation, each of them picked up their new folio and played their assigned part with abandon.

What does my 14-year-old self have to tell me? “You are doomed,” he says matter-of-factly. “That’s just the way it is. Too many balls. But it's going to be OK.” 

More anon,

Paul 

P.S. — I have posted this and my previous entries on the web, for those of you new to my mailing list and wanting to catch up:

California Daze (2022-3)

Under Construction (2023-4)

Golden State (2024-6)

I have also attached a photo of the Seattle Space Needle, as seen from the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum. I visited Seattle to help send off a dear friend who passed away earlier this year, and spent part of an afternoon admiring the iconic structure rising into the sky. Construction of the Seattle Space Needle began in 1961, the same year President Kennedy launched his Council on Physical Fitness.