One day when I was in 4th or 5th grade a huge crowd of kids collected to play dodgeball during recess on the dodgeball circles that were painted on the asphalt “playground” on the west side of Bluffdale Elementary School. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was 4th grade, because that was the first year Bluffdale Elementary was open, and the school district hadn't brought in any portable classrooms yet to deal with overcrowding. The presence of these portable classrooms is relevant to my story here because when they were brought in, they got parked right on top of the dodgeball circles that provide the setting of this story. If it weren't for the fact that my friends and I had shifted our recreative attentions to basketball by the time the "portables" took up residence, I'm certain there would have been considerable, though ultimately futile, outrage regarding their placement. Such outrage would have been misplaced because, honestly, it was a terrible idea to paint circles on asphalt and encourage kids to throw balls at one another in them. The skinned knee that makes an appearance in the story-to-come was a clearly anticipatable and preventable injury. So parking the portables where they did was a serendipitous byproduct of the school district’s bureaucratic short-sightedness (and/or cheap-skatedness) manifested in its building a school that, within a year, was already over-crowded. I probably shouldn’t be so critical of school districts and their decisions. I have no idea how they make the decisions they make and I haven’t done my mile-shoe-walking, etc. But here I'm getting away from the story I came to tell. So, back to that lovely Spring day in 4th grade when there was a big dodgeball game going at recess.
The size of the game is important to note here because it was hard to get enough people together to play a decent game of dodgeball. Especially when they had the whole world of recess opportunities open to them and a mere 20 or 30 minutes in which to take advantage. So having such a large game was a rare and wonderful thing. In the run-up to the game getting going, probably during the teams being chosen, I remember specifically thinking I needed to make the most of this opportunity and have as much fun and as good of a time as I could, because these kinds of dodgeball games didn't come around all that often.
Just thinking about this game, I can still smell the way your hands smell when they’ve been dirtied by a rubber ball that has, in turn, been dirtied by asphalt. And I can still feel the occasionally painful roughness of a rubber dodgeball as it is thrown/caught/ricocheted off one’s face. And my stomach still remembers the thrill of elation that accompanies a successful dodge as well as the devastating shame and disappointment of being gotten out. It's a cliche of cliches to rhapsodize about wanting to return to these halcyon moments of childhood, so it’s probably a good thing that this story isn’t headed in that direction.
Don’t get me wrong, for most of the kids playing dodgeball that day, this probably was about as near an approximation of the platonic ideal of elementary school recess as could be asked for. But for me, and for Ben Tolman, this was not such a day. At least, not in the way you might think.
Ben and I were the same age and lived a mere 2-3 miles away from one another, but we weren't in the same class, and, if memory serves, he was on A track or maybe B, and I was on D track. So while we both took up residence in the same basic plane of existence and in fairly proximal social circles, the year-round school schedule made it so we didn't see much of one another. Whenever we did interact and play together, we did so on friendly enough terms, but he was, from my experience, just another one of the many somewhat flat characters that existed on the fringes of my life, which, as everyone can agree, is the central plot of all human drama.
I can't remember blow-by-blow account of exactly what happened in the dodgeball game that day, but I remember enough to remember that there was an altercation between me and Ben. One of us probably did something to get the other one out of the game, and the getter outer probably did their getting out a bit underhandedly or in a way that resulted in some kind of uncertainty about whether the one of us that was allegedly gotten out was, in fact, out.
You'll remember that there were considerably more kids playing this day than usual, and so, while having a crowd made the game that much more exciting and wonderful, it also made getting out that much more devastating, because it meant you had to wait longer to be able to play again. And to be gotten out in such a game by illicit and/or uncertain means was the absolutely height of unfairness. To make matters worse, whatever it was that the getter had done to get the other of us out had also resulted in a skinned knee for the gotten, adding further insult to the miserable unfairness of the situation.
So the one of us that was gotten out decided to protest vociferously about whether he was, in very fact, out, thus causing the game grind to a halt. This was by design, of course, as the allegedly out boy assumed that the assembled masses would readily side with him. Surely these clear-eyed, cool-judging 9-year-olds could see just how egregious the offending out-getting was. In fact, they would probably see that it was so egregious that not only should the one of us who was provisionally out not be out, but, rather, the shady getter outer who committed this heinous crime against the holy institution of recess dodgeball should be the actual one made to be out.
As I’ve written out this remembrance of the altercation I've realized that I was almost certainly the one gotten out and Ben did the getting. As is true of most 9-year-olds, I went about all aspects of my life with a righteous assurance that I was always right about everything. (If you want a corroborating witness, just ask my sister Heather.) So it feels all-too-familiar that I would be the one outraged beyond all reason at the unfairness of having been got out due to some patently unjust play while engaged in this, the most transcendent dodgeball game in all of human history.
Anyway, I ranted and carried on for some time, appealing to everyone that I wasn’t actually supposed to be out. But everyone didn’t really care who was out, they just wanted to keep playing. So they told us both to get lost and to quit ruining the game.
As I left the game fuming about how wronged I was, the truth is I was mostly just crushed to be on the outside of the only important dodgeball game that had ever been played. And, frankly, that was a considerably more painful blow than the one that had caused the trickle of blood dripping from my knee.
As I started to cool down and began considering what, among the vastly inferior options, I was going to do with the rest of my recess, I started to feel more and more awful. But not from being kicked out of the game, and not from being on the receiving end of an unjust ruling, and not from being told I was ruining recess by everyone whose opinion I actually cared about. No, I realized I was feeling awful about how my making such a big deal out of the issue made it so that Ben was kicked out of the game too.
That dodgeball game was the only thing I cared about in the whole world right then, and, in a rare moment of clarity wherein I comprehended that I was not the only being in existence with complex thoughts, feelings, desires, and motivations, I realized that maybe Ben wanted to play just as much as I did. And in contemplating this I realized that if our places had been switched, I would’ve tried to get Ben out by doing the same things he had done to get me out, and probably more. In contrast, he probably wouldn’t have been such a whiner about getting out like I was. And that thought, coupled with the fact that it was my whining and pleading and game-stopping that got him kicked out of the game, was eating away at me and making me thoroughly miserable.
So, rather go for a swing on the swing set, or chuck dirt clods at whatever it is kids chuck dirt clods at, or do any of the other activities on offer that I might ordinarily have done, I started looking for Ben to apologize. And it wasn't too long before I found him because, you see, he had been looking for me too.
It came out that both of us had been feeling pretty crummy along pretty similar lines. That is, while both of us were somewhat at fault for the situation — though clearly I was the more culpable of the two of us — we were both feeling complete ownership of the guilt for the whole situation, and we both felt compelled to tell the other how sorry we were.
Make no mistake, this was no grand cinematic apology. There were no eloquent speeches, no sweeping admissions of wrong-doing, no gracious acceptances of the other's apology, and no plaintive orchestral score accentuating the emotional poignancy of the moment. We both probably just kind of mumbled and stumbled our way through our apologies, and that was the extent of it.
Though our apologies lacked the showmanship and panache of a more practiced repentant sinner, the results were not less miraculous. Where I had been feeling increasingly miserable because of the guilt-ridden pit in my stomach that deepened with every step away from the dodgeball game, after chatting briefly with Ben I felt wonderful. I felt light and free. I felt like laughing and smiling. And while I can't say for certain that Ben felt the exact same way, I was pretty sure he did because where he had come up to me with shoulders hunched and head down, now he was smiling broadly and openly, reflecting back to me the joy that I was feeling.
It would be a nice, Frank Capra-esque ending auto this story to say that a deep and abiding friendship was born on the back of that moment of reconciliation, but it wouldn't be true. Ben and went back to existing on the peripheries of one another's lives. And that would have probably continued to be the case if not for the fact that a few years later the State of Utah decided it needed to build a new highway through my family's front yard, causing us to move to another part of Bluffdale. And who should be at church that first Sunday after we moved but Ben Tolman himself.
Being the same age, Ben and I attended the same classes at church, and we were in the same Boy Scout troop, so by the natural course of events we became much better and closer friends. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was Ben that, for one of my early teen birthdays, gave me that fateful bag of Starbursts that I ate in its entirety in the space of about an hour, and that my stomach rejected in short order, and that resulted in the most stunningly colorful vomit that ever was vomited.
I’m pretty sure that even without our post-dodgeball dustup mutual apology we would have still become the good friends down the road that we became. After all, when you spend a lot of time with people your own age, and those people aren't outright jerks, there's a pretty good chance you'll be friends. (And maybe even sometimes when they are outright jerks too.) Over the course of that friendship, I don’t even thing we've ever talked about the dodgeball incident. I honestly wouldn't be at all surprised if Ben doesn't remember that it even happened.
In the course of human events, it really wasn’t that remarkable of an occasion. Two kids whose problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world got their feelings hurt and then made up. Great. But sometimes it’s those unremarkable events that I can’t help but remember 30 years later and that I feel compelled to remark upon on Sunday evenings when I’m in a more contemplative mood.
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